ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 







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ADVENTURES 
IN CONTENTMENT 

By 

DAVID GRAYSON „.- 



Illustrated by 
THOMAS FOGARTY 




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Garden City New York 
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

1910 



7s 3603 



Copyright, 1906, 1907, by 
The Phillips Publishing Company 



Copyright, 1907, by 

DOUBLEDAY, PaGE & COMPANY 

Published, November, 1907 



All Rights Reserved 

Including that of Translation into Foreign Languages 

Including the Scandinavian 



J 




The place of the rushes and the flac/'^ 




INTRODUCTION 



" I think I could stop here myself and do miracles." 

I HAVE been for eight years a farmer. Dur- 
ing that time and without the ulterior 
motive of pubhcation, but for my own enjoy- 
ment, I have set down in small red and black 
books an account of some of the adventures of 
a quiet life. I have been engaged in three 
different kinds of farming, the first being the 
simple cultivation of the soil and the pro- 
duction of enough corn, buckwheat and lesser 
crops to satisfy the small demands of my 
household, the second being a more or less 
sedulous farming of myself. As the good 
Dr. Donne says: 

"We are but farmers of ourselves: yet may 
If we can stock ourselves and thrive, uplay 
Much, much good treasure for the great rent day." 

And finally, with some instruction and not 
a little amusement of a quiet sort, I have 
farmed with the plow of a perennial admira- 
tion, and inquisitiveness, all that world, both 



vi ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 

of men and of nature, which lies so pleasantly 
around me. By using my farm not as an 
end, but as a tool, I have cultivated with 
diligence all the greater fields of life which I 
have been able to reach. 

At first, I considered recasting my observa- 
tions in some form — perhaps a novel, pos-* 
sibly an essay — which should eliminate the 
evident first person, but I reflected that every 
writer, however he may disguise the form of 
his production, is after all chiefly concerned 
in reporting that which he discovers within 
himself. I know myself better than any one 
else, and my writing has taken the form, 
whether rightly or wrongly, at least inevitably, 
of intimate observation and personal narrative. 
I have, therefore, and without apology, used 
the method of expression which best suits my 
nature. 

I am conscious that I can offer few of the 
''practical hints" which are distributed like 
coins at the meetings of the grange, nor have 
I the genius to write a poem, nor the ortho- 
doxy to preach a sermon. I can offer merely 
the more or less fragmentary writing of a 
man's life as it has been lived with satisfaction 
for eight years. Having perfect health, for I 



INTRODUCTION 



Vll 



live and work mostly out of doors, I not only 
enjoy my life, but I reap a kind of second 
crop frora enjoying that enjoyment. Being 
no spendthrift of opportunity I am neither 
old, nor rich, nor married, though I cannot 
for these reasons take to myself any credit for 
superior courage or merit. Nor am I tagged 
with tags: I do not belong to any church, or 
lodge, or political party; therefore I think 
whatever I please upon any subject, and what 
I think I have the indiscretion to writedown 
— without apology. My reading has been 
without rule or reason, and not even for in- 
struction, but wilfully for enjoyment, and 
I have written because, somehow, I could not 
help it. 

If the reader cares to consider the adven- 
tures within and without of such a person I 
invite him to read what I write; but if the 
prologue is uninviting he is here given fair 
warning not to proceed. 





CONTENTS 

CHAPTER 

Introduction .... 

I. The Burden of the Valley of Vision 

II. I Buy a Farm ... 

III. The Joy of Possession 

IV. I Entertain an Agent Unawares 
V. The Axe Helve .... 

VI. The Marsh Ditch 

VII. An Argument with a Millionnaire 

VIII. A Boy and a Preacher 

IX. The Tramp . 

X. The Infidel . 

XI. The Country Doctor . 

XII. An Evening at Home 

XIII. The Politician . 

XIV. The Harvest 



PAGE 
V 

3 

13 
23 
41 

58 

79 

97 

119 

132 

152 
177 
198 
218 





ILLUSTRATIONS 

The place of the rushes and the flags . Frontispiece 

FACING 
PAGE 

I thought of a certain brook I knew ... 6 

The carpentry shop 14 

Horace 20 

My own hills 102 

Spoke of her with a softening of the voice, 

looking often at Harriet .... 140 

A good man has gone away — and yet re- 
mains . 182 

He put an open bottle on his table and looked 

at it 194 

There is a great talk in Baxter*s shop . . 220 

At harvest time 244 



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ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 




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"THE BURDEN OF THE VALLEY 
OF VISION" 



A 



I CAME here eight years ago as the renter 
of this farm, of which soon afterward 
\became the owner. The time before that I 
Uke to forget. The chief impression it left 
upon my memory, now happily growing in- 
distinct, is of being hurried faster than I could 
well travel. From the moment, as a boy of 
seventeen, I first began to pay my own way, 
my days were ordered by an inscrutable 
power which drove me hourly to my task. I 
was rarely allowed to look up or down, but 
always forward, toward that vague Success 
which we Americans love to glorify. 

My senses, my nerves, even my muscles 
were continually strained to the utmost of 



4 ADVENTURES IN 

attainment. If I loitered or paused by the 
wayside, as it seems natural for me to do, I 
soon heard the sharp crack of the lash. For 
many years, and I can say it truthfully, I never 
rested. I neither thought nor reflected. I 
had no pleasure, even though I pursued it 
fiercely during the brief respite of vacations. 
Through many feverish years I did not work: 
I merely produced. 

The only real thing I did was to hurry as 
though every moment were my last, as though 
the world, which now seems so rich in every- 
thing, held only one prize which might be 
seized upon before I arrived. Since then I 
have tried to recall, like one who struggle.^^ ) 
restore the visions of a fever, what it was \ < : 
I ran to attain, or why I should have borne 
without rebellion such indignities to soul and 
body. That life seems now, of all illusions, 
the most distant and unreal. It is like the 
unguessed eternity before we are born: not 
of concern compared with that eternity upon 
which we are now embarked. 

All these things happened in cities and 
among crowds. I like to forget them. They 
smack of that slavery of the spirit which is so 
much worse than any mere slavery of the body. 



CONTENTMENT 5 

One day — it was in April, I remember, and 
the soft maples in the city park were just 
beginning to blossom — I stopped suddenly. 
I did not intend to stop. I confess in humili- 
ation that it was no courage, no will of my 
own. I intended to go on toward Success: 
but Fate stopped me. It was as if I had been 
thrown violently from a moving planet: all 
the universe streamed around me and past 
me. It seemed to me that of all animate 
creation, I was the only thing that was still or 
silent. Until I stopped I had not known the 
pace I ran; and I had a vague sympathy and 
understanding, never felt before, for those 
who left the running. I lay prostrate with 
fever and close to death for weeks and watched 
the world go by: the dust, the noise, the very 
colour of haste. The only sharp pang that 
I suffered was the feeling that I should be 
broken-hearted and that I was not; that I 
should care and that I did not. It was as 
though I had died and escaped all further 
responsibility. I even watched with dim 
equanimity my friends racing past me, pant- 
ing as they ran. Some of them paused an 
instant to comfort me where I la}^ but I could 
see that their minds were still upon the nm- 



6 ADVENTURES IN 

ning and I was glad when they went away. 
I cannot tell with what weariness their haste 
oppressed me. As for them, they somehow 
blamed me for dropping out. I knew. Until 
we ourselves understand, we accept no excuse 
from the man who stops. While I felt it all, 
I was not bitter. I did not seem to care. I 
said to myself: ''This is Unfitness. I sur- 
vive no longer. So be it." 

Thus I lay, and presently I began to hunger 
and thirst. Desire rose within me: the in- 
describable longing of the convalescent for 
the food of recovery. So I lay, questioning 
wearily what it was that I required. One 
morning I wakened with a strange, new joy 
in my soul. It came to me at that moment 
with indescribable poignancy, the thought of 
walking barefoot in cool, fresh plow furrows 
as I had once done when a boy. So vividly 
the memory came to me — the high airy 
world as it was at that moment, and the boy 
I was walking free in the furrows — that the 
weak tears filled my eyes, the first I had shed 
in many years. Then I thought of sitting in 
quiet thickets in old fence corners, the wood 
behind me rising still, cool, mysterious, and the 
fields in front stretching away in illimitable 




I THOUGHT OF A CERTAIN BROOK I KNEW 



CONTENTMENT 7 

pleasantness. I thought of the good smell 
of cows at milking — you do not know, if 
you do not know ! — I thought of the sights 
and sounds, the heat and sweat of the hay 
fields. I thought of a certain brook I knew 
when a boy that flowed among alders and 
wild parsnips, where I waded with a three- 
foot rod for trout. I thought of all these 
things as a man thinks of his first love. Oh, 
I craved the soil. I hungered and thirsted 
for the earth. I was greedy for growing 
things. 

And thus, eight years ago, I came here like 
one sore-wounded creeping from the field of 
battle. I remember walking in the sunshine, 
weak yet, but cu. iously satisfied. I that was 
dead lived again. It came to me then with 
a curious certainty, not since so assuring, that 
I understood the chief marvel of nature hid- 
den within the Story of the Resurrection, the 
marvel of plant and seed, father and son, the 
wonder of the seasons, the miracle of life. I, 
too, had died: I had lain long in darkness, 
and now I had risen again upon the sweet 
earth. And I possessed beyond others a 
knowledge of a former existence, which I 
knew, even then, I could never return to. 



8 ADVENTURES IN 

For a time, in the new life, I was ha^^py to 
drunkenness — working, eating, sleeping. 1 
w^as an animal again, let out to run in green 
pastures. I was glad of the sunrise and the 
sunset. I was glad at noon. It delighted 
me when my muscles ached with work and 
when, after supper, I could not keep my eyes 
open for sheer weariness. And sometimes 
I was awakened in the night out of a sound 
sleep — seemingly by the very silences — and 
lay in a sort of bodily comfort impossible to 
describe. 

I did not want to feel or to think: I merely 
wanted to live. In the sun or the rain I 
wanted to go out and come in, and never again 
know the pain of the unquiet spirit. I looked 
forward to an awakening not without dread, 
for we are as helpless before birth as in the 
presence of death. 

But like all birth, it came, at last, sud- 
denly. All that summer I had worked in a 
sort of animal content. Autumn had now 
come, late autumn, with coolness in the even- 
ing air. I was plowing in my upper field — 
not then mine in fact — and it was a soft 
afternoon with the earth turning up moist and 
fragrant. I had been walking the furrows all 



CONTENTMENT 9 

day long. I had taken note, as though my 
life depended upon it, of the occasional stones 
or roots in my field, I made sure of the adjust- 
ment of the harness, I drove with peculiar 
care to save the horses. With such simple 
details of the work in hand I had found it my 
joy to occupy my mind. Up to that moment 
the most important things in the world had 
seemed a straight furrow and well-turned 
corners — to me, then, a profound accom- 
plishment. 

I cannot well describe it, save by the analogy 
of an opening door somewhere within the 
house of my consciousness. I had been in 
the dark: I seemed to emerge. I had been 
bound down : I seemed to leap up — and with 
a marvellous sudden sense of freedom and joy. 

I stopped there in my field and looked up. 
And it was as if I had never looked up before. 
I discovered another world. It had been 
there before, for long and long, but I had 
never seen nor felt it. All discoveries are 
made in that way: a man finds the new thing, 
not in nature but in himself. 

It was as though, concerned with plow and 
harness and furrow, I had never known that 
the world had height or colour or sweet sounds, 



lo ADVENTURES IN 

or that there was feeling in a. hillside. I for- 
got myself, or where I was. I stood a long 
time motionless. My dominant feeling, if I 
can at all express it, was of a strange new 
friendliness, a warmth, as though these hills, 
this field about me, the woods, had suddenly 
spoken to me and caressed me. It was as 
though I had been accepted in membership, 
as though I was now recognised, after long 
trial, as belonging here. 

Across the town road which separates my 
farm from my nearest neighbour's, I saw a 
field, familiar, yet strangely new and unfa- 
miliar, lying up to the setting sun, all red with 
autumn; above it the incalculable heights of 
the sky, blue, but not quite clear, owing to 
the Indian summer haze. I cannot convey 
the sweetness and softness of that landscape, 
the airiness of it, the m37stery of it, as it came 
to me at that moment. It was as though, 
looking at an acquaintance long known, I 
should discover that I loved him. As I 
stood there I was conscious of the cool tang 
of burning leaves and brush heaps, the lazy 
smoke of which floated down the long valley 
and found me in my field, and finally I heard, 
as though the sounds were then made for the 



CONTENTMENT 



II 



first time, all the vague murmurs of the coun- 
try side — a cow-bell somewhere in the dis- 
tance, the creak of a wagon, the blurred 
evening hum of birds, insects, frogs. So 
much it means for a man to stop and look up 
from his task. So I stood, and I looked up 
and down with a glow and a thrill which I 
cannot now look back upon without some 
envy and a little amusement at the very grand- 
ness and seriousness of it all. And I said 
aloud to myself: 

" I will be as broad as the earth. I will 
not be limited." 

Thus I was born into the present world, and 
here I continue, not knowing what other 
world I may yet achieve. I do not know, but 
I wait in expectancy, keeping my furrows 
straight and my corners well turned. Since 
that day in the field, though my fences in- 
clude no more acres, and I still plow my own 
fields, my real domain has expanded until I 
crop wide fields and take the profit of many 
curious pastures. From my farm I can see 
most of the world; and if I wait here long 
enough all people pass this way. 

And I look out upon them not in the 
surroundings which they have chosen for 



12 ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 

themselves, but from the vantage ground of 
my famiHar world. The symbols which meant 
so much in cities mean little here. Some- 
times it seems to me as though I saw 
men naked. They come and stand beside my 
oak, and the oak passes solemn judgment; 
they tread my furrows and the clods give 
silent evidence; "^hey touch the green blades 
of my corn, the corn whispers its sure con- 
clusions. Stern judgments that will be de- 
ceived by no symbols! 

Thus I have delighted, secretly, in calling 
myself an unlimited farmer, and I make this 
confession in answer to the inner and truthful 
demand of the soul that we are not, after all, 
the slaves of things, whether corn, or bank- 
notes, or spindles; that we are not the used, 
but the users; that life is more than profit 
and loss. And so I shall expect that while 
I am talking farm some of you may be think- 
ing dry goods, banking, literature, carpentry, 
or what-not. But if you can say: I am an 
unlimited dry goods merchant, I am an un- 
limited carpenter, I will give you an old- 
fashioned country hand-shake, strong and 
warm. We are friends; our orbits coincide. 




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II 



I BUY A FARM 



AS I have said, when I came here I came 
u as a renter, working all of the first 
summer without that ''open vision" of which 
the prophet Samuel speaks. I had no mem- 
ory of the past and no hope of the future. I 
fed upon the moment. My sister Harriet kept 
the house and I looked after the farm and the 
fields. In all those months I hardly knew 
that I had neighbours, although Horace, from 
whom I rented my place, was not infrequently 
a visitor. He has since said that I looked at 
him as though he were a ''statute." I was 

13 



14 ADVENTURES IN 

"citified," Horace said; and "citified" with 
us here in the country is nearly the Hmit of 
invective, though not violent enough to dis- 
courage such a gift of sociability as his. The 
Scotch Preacher, the rarest, kindest man I 
know, called once or twice, wearing the air of 
formality which so ill becomes him. I saw 
nothing in him: it was my fault, not his, that 
I missed so many weeks of his friendship. 
Once in that time the Professor crossed my 
fields with his tin box slung from his shoulder ; 
and the only feeling I had, born of crowded 
cities, was that this was an intrusion upon 
my property. Intrusion: and the Professor! 
It is now^ unthinkable. I often passed the 
Carpentry Shop on my way to town. I saw 
Baxter many times at his bench. Even then 
Baxter's eyes attracted me: he always glanced 
up at me as I passed, and his look had in it 
something of a caress. So the home of Stark- 
weather, standing aloof among its broad 
lawns and tall trees, carried no meaning for 
me. 

Of all my neighbours, Horace is the nearest. 
From the back door of my house, looking 
over the hill, I can see the two red chimneys 
of his home, and the top of the windmill. 



A 



CONTENTMENT 15 

Horace's barn and corn silo are more pre- 
tentious by far than his house, but for- 
tunately they stand on lower ground, where 
they are not visible from my side of the hill. 
Five minutes' walk in a straight line across 
the fields brings me to Horace's door; by the 
road it takes at least ten minutes. 

In the fall after my arrival I had come to 
love the farm and its surroundings so much 
that I decided to have it for my own. I did 
not look ahead to being a farmer. I did not 
ask Harriet's advice. I found myself sitting 
one day in the justice's office. The justice 
was bald and as dry as corn fodder in March. 
He sat with spectacled impressiveness behind 
his ink-stained table. Horace hitched his heel 
on the round of his chair and put his hat on 
his knee. He wore his best coat and his 
hair was brushed in deference to the occasion. 
He looked uncomfortable, but important. 
I sat opposite him, somewhat overwhelmed 
by the business in hand. I felt like an inade- 
quate boy measured against solemnities too 
large for him. The processes seemed curi- 
ously unconvincing, like a game in which the 
important part is to keep from laughing; and 
yet when I thought of laughing I felt cold 



i6 ADVENTURES IN 

chills of horror. If I had laughed at that 
moment I cannot think what that justice 
would have said! But it was a pleasure to 
have the old man read the deed, looking at 
me over his spectacles from time to time to 
make sure I was not playing truant. There 
are good and great words in a deed. One of 
them I brought away with me from the con- 
ference, a very fine, big one, which I love to 
have out now and again to remind me of the 
really serious things of life. It gives me a 
peculiar dry, legal feeling. If I am about to 
enter upon a serious bargain, like the sale of a 
cow, I am more avaricious if I work with it 
under my tongue. 

Hereditaments ! Hereditaments ! 

Some words need to be fenced in, pig-tight, 
so that they cannot escape us; others we 
prefer to have running at large, indefinite but 
inclusive. I would not look up that word for 
anything: I might find it fenced in so that it 
could not mean to me all that it does now. 

Hereditaments! May there be many of 
them — or it ! 

Is it not a fine Providence that gives us 
different things to love? In the purchase of 
my farm both Horace and I got the better of 



CONTENTMENT 17 

the bargain — and yet neither was cheated. 
In reaHty a fairly strong lantern light will 
shine through Horace, and I could see that 
he was hugging himself with the joy of his 
bargain; but I was content. I had some 
money left — what more does anyone w^ant 
after a bargain ? — and I had come into 
possession of the thing I desired most of all. 
Looking at bargains from a purely commercial 
point of view, someone is always cheated, but 
looked at with the simple eye both seller and 
buyer always win. 

We came away from the gravity of that 
bargaining in Horace's wagon. On our 
way home Horace gave me fatherly advice 
about using my farm. He spoke from the 
height of his knowledge to me, a humble 
beginner. The conversation ran something 
like this: 

Horace : Thar 's a clump of plum trees 
along the lower pasture fence. Perhaps you 
saw 'm 

Myself: I saw them: that is one reason 
I bought the back pasture. In May they 
will be full of blossoms. 

Horace: They're wild plums: they ain't 
good for nothing. 



i8 ADVENTURES IN 

Myself: But think how fine they will be 
all the year round. 

Horace: Fine! They take up a quarter- 
acre of good land. I 've been going to cut 
'em myself this ten years. 

Myself: I don't think I shall want them 
cut out. 

Horace: Humph. 

After a pause: 

Horace : There 's a lot of good body cord- 
wood in that oak on the knoll. 

Myself : Cord-wood ! Why, that oak is the 
treasure of the w^hole farm. I have never seen 
a finer one. I could not think of cutting it. 

Horace : It will bring you fifteen or twenty 
dollars cash in hand. 

Myself : But I rather have the oak. 

Horace: Humph. 

So our conversation continued for some 
time. I let Horace know that I preferred 
rail fences, even old ones, to a wire fence, 
and that I thought a farm should not be too 
large, else it might keep one away from his 
friends. And what, I asked, is corn com- 
pared with a friend? Oh, I grew really 
oratorical! I gave it as my opinion that 
there should be vines around the house (Waste 



CONTENTMENT 19 

of time, said Horace), and that no farmer 
should permit anyone to paint medicine 
advertisements on his barn (Brings lyou ten 
dollars a year, said Horace), and that I pro- 
posed to fix the bridge on the lower road 
(What's a path-master for? asked Horace). 
I said that a town was a useful adjunct for a 
farm ; but I laid it down as a principle that no 
town should be too near a farm. I finally 
became so enthusiastic in setting forth my 
conceptions of a true farm that I reduced 
Horace to a series of humphs. The early 
humphs were incredulous, but as I proceeded, 
with some joy, they became humorously con- 
temptuous, and finally began to voice a large, 
comfortable, condescending tolerance. I 
could fairly feel Horace growing superior 
as he sat there beside me. Oh, he had every- 
thing in his favour. He could prove w^hat he 
said: One tree + one thicket = twenty dollars. 
One landscape = ten cords of wood = a quarter- 
acre'of corn = twenty dollars . These equations 
prove themselves. Moreover, was not Horace 
the "best off" of any farmer in the country? 
Did he not have the largest barn and the 
best corn silo? And are there better argu- 
ments? 



20 ADVENTURES IN 

Have you ever had anyone give you up as 
hopeless? And is it not a pleasure? It is 
only after people resign you to your fate that 
you really make friends of them. For how 
can you win the friendship of one who is trying 
to convert you to his superior beliefs ? 

As we talked, then, Horace and I, I began 
to have hopes of him. There is no joy com- 
parable to the making of a friend, and the 
more resistant the material the greater the 
triumph. Baxter, the carpenter, says that 
when he works for enjoyment he chooses 
curly maple. 

When Horace set me down at my gate that 
afternoon he gave me his hand and told me 
that he would look in on me occasionally, and 
that if I had any trouble to let him know. 

A few days later I heard by the round- 
about telegraph common in country neigh- 
bourhoods that Horace had found a good 
deal of fun in reporting what I said about 
farming and that he had called me by a highly 
humorous but disparaging name. Horace 
has a vein of humour all his own. I have 
caught him alone in his fields chuckling to 
himself, and even breaking out in a loud laugh 
at the memory of some amusing incident that 




HORACE 



CONTENTMENT 21 

happened ten years ago. One day, a month 
or more after our bargain, Horace came down 
across his field and hitched his jean-clad leg 
over my fence, with the intent, I am sure, of 
delving a little more in the same rich mine of 
humour. 

*' Horace," I said, looking him straight 
in the eye, "did you call me an — Agricul- 
turist!" 

I have rarely seen a man so pitifully con- 
fused as Horace was at that moment. He 
flushed, he stammered, he coughed, the 
perspiration broke out on his forehead. He 
tried to speak and could not. I was sorry 
for him. 

"Horace," I said, "you're a Farmer." 

We looked at each other a moment with 
dreadful seriousness, and then both of us 
laughed to the point of holding our sides. 
We slapped our knees, we shouted, we 
wriggled, we almost rolled with merriment. 
Horace put out his hand and we shook 
heartily. In five minutes I had the whole 
story of his humorous reports out of him. 

No real friendship is ever made without 
an initial clashing which discloses the metal 
of each to each. Since that day Horace's 



2 2 ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 

jean-clad leg has rested many a time on my 
fence and we have talked crops and calves. 
We have been the best of friends in the way 
of whiffle-trees, butter tubs and pig killings 
— but never once looked up together at the 
sky. 

The chief objection to a joke in the country 
is that it is so imperishable. There is so much 
room for jokes and so few jokes to fill it. 
When I see Horace approaching with a pe- 
culiar, friendly, reminiscent smile on his face 
I hasten with all ardour to anticipate him : 

" Horace," I exclaim, '' you 're a Farmer." 





" The heat and sweat of the hay fields" 



III 



THE JOY OF POSSESSION 

**How sweet the west wind sounds in my own trees: 
How graceful climb these shadows on my hill." 

ALWAYS as I travel, I think, ''Here I am, 
let anything happen ! ' ' 
I do not want to know the future: knowl- 
edge is too certain, too cold, too real. 

It is true that I have not always met the 
fine adventure nor won the friend, but if I 
had, what should I have more to look for at 
other turnings and other hilltops? 

The afternoon of my purchase was one of 
the great afternoons of my life. When 

23 



24 ADVENTURES IN 

Horace put me down at my gate, I did not 
go at once to the house; I did not wish, then, 
to talk with Harriet. The things I had with 
myself were too important. I skulked to- 
ward my barn, compelling myself to walk 
slowly until I reached the corner, where I 
broke into an eager run as though the old 
Nick himself were after me. Behind the 
barn I dropped down on the grass, panting 
with laughter, and not without some of the 
shame a man feels at being a boy. Close 
along the side of the barn, as I sat there in 
the cool of the shade, I could see a tangled 
mat of smartweed and catnip, and the boards 
of the barn, brown and weather-beaten, and 
the gables above with mud swallows' nests, 
now deserted; and it struck me suddenly, as 
I observed these homely pleasant things: 

''All this is mine." 

I sprang up and drew a long breath. 

"Mine," I said. 

It came to me then like an inspiration that 
I might now go out and take formal pos- 
session of my farm. I might experience the 
emotion of a landowner. I might swell with 
dignity and importance — for once, at least. 

So I started at the fence corner back of 



CONTENTMENT 25 

the barn and walked straight up through the 
pasture, keeping close to my boundaries, that 
I might not miss a single rod of my acres. 
And oh, it was a prime afternoon! The Lord 
made it ! Sunshine — and autumn haze — 
and red trees — and yellow fields — and blue 
distances above the far-away town. And 
the air had a tang which got into a man's 
blood and set him chanting all the poetry he 
ever knew. 

"I climb that was a clod, 

I run whose steps were slow, 
I reap the very wheat of God 
That once had none to sow!'* 

So I walked up the margin of my field 
looking broadly about me: and presently, I 
began to examine my fences — 'tny fences — ■ 
with a critical eye. I considered the quality 
of the soil, though in truth I was not much 
of a judge of such matters. I gloated over 
my plowed land, lying there open and pas- 
sive in the sunshine. I said of this tree: ''It 
is mine," and of its companion beyond the 
fence: "It is my neighbour's." Deeply and 
sharply within myself I drew the line be- 
tween meum and Uium: for only thus, by 



26 ADVENTURES IN 

comparing ourselves with our neighbours, can 
we come to the true reahsation of property. 
Occasionally I stopped to pick up a stone and 
cast it over the fence, thinking with some 
truculence that my neighbour would probably 
throw it back again. Never mind, I had it 
out of my field. Once, with eager surplusage 
of energy, I pulled down a dead and partly 
rotten oak stub, long an eye-sore, with an 
important feeling of proprietorship. I could 
do anything I liked. The farm was mine. 

How sweet an emotion is possession! 
What charm is inherent in ownership! 
What a foundation for vanity, even for the 
greater quality of self-respect, lies in a little 
property! I fell to thinking of the excellent 
wording of the old books in which land is 
called "real property," or "real estate." 
Money we may possess, or goods or chattels, 
but they give no such impression of mineness 
as the feeling that one's feet rest upon soil that 
is his: that part of the deep earth is his with 
all the water upon it, all small animals that 
creep or crawl in the holes of it, all birds or 
insects that fty in the air above it, all trees, 
shrubs, flowers, and grass that grow upon it, 
all houses, barns and fences — all, his. As I 



CONTENTMENT 27 

strode along that afternoon I fed upon posses- 
sion. I rolled the sweet morsel of ownership 
under my tongue. I seemed to set my feet 
down more firmly on the good earth. I 
straightened my shoulders: this land was 
mine. I picked up a clod of earth and let it 
crumble and drop through my fingers: it 
gave me a peculiar and poignant feeling of 
possession. I can understand why the miser 
enjoys the very physical contact of his gold. 
Every sense I possessed, sight, hearing, smell, 
touch, fed upon the new joy. 

At one corner of my upper field the fence 
crosses an abrupt ravine upon leggy stilts. 
My line skirts the slope halfway up. My 
neighbour owns the crown of the hill which 
he has shorn until it resembles the tonsured 
pate of a monk. Every rain brings the light 
soil down the ravine and lays it like a hand 
of infertility upon my farm. It had always 
bothered me, this wastage; and as I looked 
across my fence I thought to myself: 

"I must have that hill. I will buy it. I 
will set the fence farther up. I will plant 
the slope. It is no age of tonsures either in 
religion or agriculture." 

The very vision of widened acres set my 



28 ADVENTURES IN 

thoughts on fire. In imagination I extended 
my farm upon all sides, thinking how much 
better I could handle my land than my neigh- 
bours. I dwelt avariciously upon more pos- 
sessions: I thought with discontent of my 
poverty. More land I wanted. I was en- 
veloped in clouds of envy. I coveted my 
neighbour's land: I felt myself superior and 
Horace inferior: I was consumed with black 
vanity. 

So I dealt hotly with these thoughts until 
I reached the top of the ridge at the farther 
corner of my land. It is the highest point on 
the farm. 

For a moment I stood looking about me — 
a wonderful prospect of serene beauty. As 
it came to me — hills, fields, woods — the 
fever which had been consuming me died 
down. I thought how the world stretched 
away from my fences — just such fields — 
for a thousand miles, and in each small en- 
closure a man as hot as I with the passion of 
possession. How they all envied, and hated, 
in their longing for more land! How prop- 
erty kept them apart, prevented the close, 
confident touch of friendship, how it sepa- 
rated lovers and ruined families! Of all 



CONTENTMENT 29 

obstacles to that complete democracy of 
which we dream, is there a greater than 
property? 

I w^as ashamed. Deep shame covered me. 
How little of the earth, after all, I said, lies 
within the limits of my fences. And I looked 
out upon the perfect beauty of the world 
around me, and I saw how little excited it was, 
how placid, how undemanding. 

I had come here to be free and already this 
farm, which I thought of so fondly as my 
possession, w^as coming to possess me. 
" Ownership is an appetite like hunger or thirst, 
and as we may eat to gluttony and drink to 
drunkenness so we may possess to avarice. 
How many men have I seen who, though they 
regard themselves as models of temperance, 
wear the marks of unbridled indulgence of the 
passion of possession, and how like gluttony 
or licentiousness it sets its sure sign upon 
their faces. 

I said to myself. Why should any man 
fence himself in? And why hope to enlarge 
one's world by the creeping acquisition of 
a few acres to his farm? I thought of the 
old scientist, who, laying his hand upon the 
grass, remarked : " Everything under my hand 









■t' 



■cm 






.1 \ J . 5 



("i'^' lit 









.^ 









^^?^^■^'''^M^^ 








;,N^'^^ "■■■ ' 









ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 31 

is a miracle" — forgetting that everything 
outside was also a miracle. 

As I stood there I glanced across the broad 
valley wherein lies the most of my farm, to a 
field of buckwheat which belongs to Horace. 
For an instant it gave me the illusion of a hill 
on fire : for the late sun shone full on the thick 
ripe stalks of the buckwheat, giving forth an 
abundant red glory that blessed the eye. Horace 
had been proud of his crop, smacking his lips at 
the prospect of winter pancakes, and here I 
was entering his field and taking without 
hindrance another crop, a crop gathered not 
with hands nor stored in granaries : a wonder- 
ful crop, which, once gathered, may long be 
fed upon and yet remain unconsumed. 

So I looked across the countryside ; a group 
of elm^s here, a tufted hilltop there, the smooth 
verdure of pastures, the rich brown of new- 
plowed fields — and the odours, and the sounds 
of the country — all cropped by me. How 
little the fences keep me out : I do not regard 
titles, nor consider boundaries. I enter either 
by day or by night, but not secretly. Taking 
my fill, I leave as much as I find. 

And thus standing upon the highest hill in 
my upper pasture, I thought of the quoted 



32 ADVENTURES IN 

saying of a certain old abbot of the 
middle ages — ''He that is a true monk 
considers nothing as belonging to him 
except a lyre." 

What finer spirit? Who shall step forth 
freer than he who goes with nothing save his 
lyre? He shall sing as he goes: he shall not 
be held down nor fenced in. 

With a lifting of the soul I thought of that 
old abbot, how smooth his brow, how catholic 
his interest, how serene his outlook, how free 
his friendships, how unlimited his whole life. 
Nothing but a lyre! 

So I made a covenant there with myself. 
I said: "I shall use, not be used. I do not 
limit myself here. I shall not allow pos- 
sessions to come between me and my life or 
my friends." 

For a time — how long I do not know — I 
stood thinking. Presently I discovered, mov- 
ing slowly along the margin of the field below 
me, the old professor with his tin botany box. 
And somehow I had no feeling that he was 
intruding upon my new land. His walk was 
slow and methodical, his head and even his 
shoulders were bent — almost habitually — 
from looking close upon the earth, and from 



CONTENTMENT ^3 

time to time he stooped, and once he knelt to 
examine some object that attracted his eye. 
It seemed appropriate that he should thus 
kneel to the earth. So he gathered his crop 
and fences did not keep him out nor titles 
disturb him. He also was free! It gave me 
at that moment a peculiar pleasure to have 
him on my land, to know that I was, if uncon- 
sciously, raising other crops than I knew. I 
felt friendship for this old professor: I could 
understand him, I thought. And I said aloud 
but in a low tone, as though I were addressing 
him: 

— Do not apologise, friend, when you 
come into my field. You do not interrupt 
me. What you have come for is of 
more importance at this moment than com . 
Who is it that says I must plow so many 
furrows this day? Come in, friend, and sit 
here on these clods: we will sweeten the 
evening with fine words. We will invest our 
time not in corn, or in cash, but in life. — 

I walked with confidence down the hill 
toward the professor. So engrossed was he 
with his employment that he did not see me 
until I was within a few paces of him. When 
he looked up at me it was as though his eyes 



34 ADVENTURES IN 

returned from some far journey. I felt at 
first out of focus, unplaced, and only gradually 
coming into view. In his hand he held a 
lump of earth containing a thrifty young plant 
of the purple cone-flower, having several 
blossoms. He worked at the lump deftly, 
delicately, so that the earth, pinched, pow- 
dered and shaken out, fell between his fingers, 
leaving the knotty yellow roots in his hand. 
I marked how firm, slow, brown, the old man 
was, how little obtrusive in my field. One 
foot rested in a furrow, the other was set 
among the grass of the margin, near the fence 
— his place, I thought. 

His first words, though of little moment in 
themselves, gave me a curious satisfaction, 
as when a coin, tested, rings true gold, or a 
hero, tried, is heroic. 

''I have rarely," he said, "seen a finer dis- 
play of rudbeckia than this, along these old 
fences." 

If he had referred to me, or questioned, or 
apologised, I should have been disappointed. 
He did not say, ''your fences," he said ''these 
fences," as though they were as much his as 
mine. And he spoke in his own world, know- 
ing that if I could enter I would, but that if 



CONTENTMENT 35 

I could not, no stooping to me would avail 
either of us. 

'*It has been a good autumn for flowers," 
I said inanely, for so many things were flying 
through my mind that I could not at once 
think of the great particular words which 
should bring us together. At first I thought 
my chance had passed, but he seemed to see 
something in me after all, for he said: 

'' Here is a peculiarly large specimen of the 
rudbeckia. Observe the deep purple of the 
cone, and the bright yellow of the petals. 
Here is another that grew hardly two feet 
away, in the grass near the fence where the 
rails and the blackberry bushes have shaded 
it. How small and undeveloped it is." 

''They crowd up to the plowed land," I 
observed. 

''Yes, they reach out for a better chance 
in life — like men. With more room, better 
food, freer air, you see how much finer they 
grow." 

It was curious to me, having hitherto barely 
observed the cone-flowers along my fences, 
save as a colour of beauty, how simply we 
fell to talking of them as though in truth they 
were people like ourselves, having our desires 



36 ADVENTURES IN 

and possessed of our capabilities. It gave me 
then, for the first time, the feehng which has 
since meant such varied enjoyment, of the 
peopHng of the woods. 

''See here," he said, ''how different the 
character of these individuals. They are all 
of the same species. They all grow along 
this fence within two or three rods; but ob- 
serve the difference not only in size but in 
colouring, in the shape of the petals, in the 
proportions of the cone. What does it all 
mean? Why, nature trying one of her end- 
less experiments. She sows here broadly, 
trying to produce better cone-flowers. A few 
she plants on the edge of the field in the hope 
that they may escape the plow. If they 
grow, better food and more sunshine produce 
more and larger flow^ers." 

So we talked, or rather he talked, finding 
in me an eager listener. And what he called 
botany seemed to me to be life. Of birth, of 
growth, of reproduction, of death, he spoke, 
and his flowers became sentient creatures 
under my eyes. 

And thus the sun went down and the purple 
mists crept silently along the distant low 
spots, and all the great, great mysteries came 



CONTENTMENT 37 

and stood before me beckoning and question- 
ing. They came and they stood, and out of 
the cone-flower, as the old professor spoke, I 
seemed to catch a glimmer of the true light. 
I reflected how truly everything is in any- 
thing. If one could really understand a cone- 
flower he could understand this Earth. 
Botany was only one road toward the 
Explanation. 

Always I hope that some traveller may have 
more news of the way than I, and sooner or 
later, I find I must make inquiry of the direc- 
tion of every thoughtful man I meet. And 
I have always had especial hope of those who 
study the sciences: they ask such intimate 
questions of nature. Theology possesses a 
vain-gloriousness which places its faith in 
human theories; but science, at its best, is 
humble before nature herself. It has no 
thesis to defend: it is content to kneel upon 
the earth, in the way of my friend, the old 
professor, and ask the simplest questions, 
hoping for some true reply. 

I wondered, then, what the professor 
thought, after his years of work, of the 
Mystery; and finally, not without confusion, 
I asked him. He listened, for the first time 



SS ADVENTURES IN 

ceasing to dig, shake out and arrange his 
specimens. When I had stopped speaking he 
remained for a moment silent, then he looked 
at me with a new regard. Finally he quoted 
quietly, but with a deep note in his voice: 

"Canst thou by searching find God ? Canst thou 
find out the Almighty unto perfection ? It is as high 
as heaven: what canst thou do ? deeper than hell, 
what canst thou know ? " 

When the professor had spoken we stood 
for a moment silent, then he smiled and said 
briskly : 

" I have been a botanist for fifty-four years. 
When I was a boy I believed implicitly in 
God. I prayed to him, having a vision of 
him — a person — before my eyes. As I 
grew older I concluded that there was no God. 
I dismissed him from the universe. I believed 
only in what I could see, or hear, or feel. I 
talked about Nature and Reality." 

He paused, the vSmile still lighting his face, 
evidently recalling to himself the old days. 
I did not interrupt him. Finally he turned to 
me and said abruptly, 

"And now — it seems to me — there is 
nothing but God." 



CONTENTMENT 39 

As he said this he hfted his arm with a 
pecuHar gesture that seemed to take in the 
whole world. 

For a time we were both silent. When I 
left him I offered my hand and told him 
I hoped I might become his friend. So I 
turned my face toward home. Evening was 
falling, and as I walked I heard the crows 
calling, and the air was keen and cool, and I 
thought deep thoughts. 

And so I stepped into the darkened stable. 
I could not see the outlines of the horse or the 
cow, but knowing the place so well I could 
easily get about. I heard the horse step aside 
with a soft expectant whinny. I smelled the 
smell of milk, the musty, sharp odour of dry 
hay, the pungent smell of manure, not un- 
pleasant. And the stable was warm after 
the cool of the fields with a sort of animal 
warmth that struck into me soothingly. I 
spoke in a low voice and laid my hand on the 
horse's flank. The flesh quivered and shrunk 
away from my touch — coming back con- 
fidently, warml}^ I ran my hand along his 
back and up his hairy neck. I felt his sensi- 
tive nose in my hand. '' You shall have your 
oats," I said, and I gave him to eat. Then 



40 ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 

I spoke as gently to the cow, and she stood 
aside to be milked. 

And afterward I came out into the clear 
bright night, and the air was sweet and cool, 
and my dog came bounding to meet me. — So 
I carried the milk into the house, and Harriet 
said in her heartiest tone : 

*'You are late, David. But sit up, I have 
kept the biscuits warm." 

And that night my sleep was sound. 





IV 



I ENTERTAIN AN AGENT UNAWARES 



WITH the coming of winter I thought the 
life of a farmer might lose something 
of its charm. So much interest lies in the 
growth not only of crops but of trees, vines, 
flowers, sentiments and emotions. In the 
summer the world is busy, concerned with 
many things and full of gossip: in the winter 
I anticipated a cessation of many active 
interests and enthusiasms. I looked forward 
to having time for my books and for the quiet 
contemplation of the life around me. Sum- 
mer indeed is for activity, winter for reflection. 

41 



42 ADVENTUREvS IN 

But when winter really came every day dis- 
covered some new work to do or some new 
adventure to enjoy. It is surprising how 
many things happen on a small farm. Exam- 
ining the book which accounts for that winter, 
I find the history of part of a forenoon, which 
will illustrate one of the curious adventures 
of a farmer's life. It is dated January 5. 

I went out this morning with my axe and 
hammer to mend the fence along the public 
road. A heavy frost fell last night and the 
brown grass and the dry ruts of the roads 
were powdered white. Even the air, which 
was perfectly still, seemed full of frost crystals, 
so that when the sun came up one seemed to 
walk in a magic world. I drew in a long 
breath and looked out across the wonderful 
shining country and I said to myself: 

''Surely, there is nowhere I would rather 
be than here." For I could have travelled 
nowhere to find greater beauty or a better 
enjoyment of it than I had here at home. 

As I worked with my axe and hammer, I 
heard a light wagon come rattling up the 
road. Across the valley a man had begun 
to chop a tree. I could see the axe steel flash 



, CONTENTMENT 43 

brilliantly in the sunshine before I heard the 
sound of the blow. 

The man in the wagon had a round face and 
a sharp blue eye. I thought he seemed a 
businesslike young man. 

''Say, there," he shouted, drawing up at 
my gate, ''would you mind holding my horse 
a minute? It 's a cold morning and he 's 
restless." 

"Certainly not," I said, and I put down 
my tools and held his horse. 

He walked up to my door with a brisk step 
and a certain jaunty poise of the head. 

*'He is well contented with himself," I 
said. "It is a great blessing for any man to 
be satisfied with what he has got." 

I heard Harriet open the door — how every 
sound rang through the still morning air ! 

The young man asked some question and 
I distinctly heard Harriet's answer: 

"He's down there." 

The young man came back: his hat was 
tipped up, his quick eye darted over my 
grounds as though in a single instant he had 
appraised everything and passed judgment 
upon the cash value of the inhabitants. He 
whistled a lively little tune. 



44 ADVENTURES IN 

*'Say,'' he said, when he reached the gate, 
not at all disconcerted, *'I thought you was 
the hired man. Your name 's Grayson, ain't 
it? Well, I want to talk with you." 

After tying and blanketing his horse and 
taking a black satchel from his buggy he led 
me up to my house. I had a pleasurable 
sense of excitement and adventure. Here 
was a new character come to my farm. Who 
knows, I thought, what he may bring with 
him: who knows what I may send away by 
him? Here in the country we must set our 
little ships afloat on small streams, hoping 
that somehow, some day, they will reach the 
sea. 

It was interesting to see the busy young 
man sit down so confidently in our best chair. 
He said his name was Dixon, and he took 
out from his satchel a book with a fine showy 
cover. He said it was called " Living Selec- 
tions from Poet, Sage and Humourist." 

''This," he told me, " is only the first of the 
series. We publish six volumes full of liter- 
choor. You see what a heavy book this is?" 

I tested it in my hand : it was a heavy book. 

"The entire set," he said, "weighs over ten 
pounds. There are 1,162 pages, enough paper 



CONTENTMENT 45 

if laid down flat, end to end, to reach half a 
mile." 

I cannot quote his exact language: there 
was too much of it, but he made an impres- 
sive showing of the amount of literature that 
could be had at a very low price per pound. 
Mr. Dixon was a hypnotist. He fixed me 
with his glittering eye, and he talked so fast, 
and his ideas upon the subject were so original 
that he held me spellbound. At first I was 
inclined to be provoked: one does not like to 
be forcibly hypnotised, but gradually the 
situation began to amuse me, the more so 
when Harriet came in. 

'' Did you ever see a more beautiful bind- 
ing?" asked the agent, holding his book 
admiringly at arm's length. ''This up here," 
he said, pointing to the illuminated cover, 
"is the Muse of Poetry. She is scattering 
flowers — poems, you know. Fine idea, ain't 
it? Colouring fine, too." 

He jumped up quickly and laid the book 
on my table, to the evident distress of Harriet. 

''Trims up the room, don't it?" he ex- 
claimed, turning his head a little to one side 
and observing the effect with an expression of 
affectionate admiration. 



46 ADVENTURES IN 

''How much," I asked, "will you sell the 
covers for without the insides?" 

"Without the insides?" 

"Yes," I said, "the binding will trim up 
my table just as well without the insides." 

I thought he looked at me a little sus- 
piciously, but he was evidently satisfied by 
my expression of countenance, for he answered 
promptly : 

"Oh, but you want the insides. That's 
what the books are for. The bindings are 
never sold alone." 

He then went on to tell me the prices and 
terms of payment, until it really seemed that 
it would be cheaper to buy the books than 
to let him carry them away again. Harriet 
stood in the doorway behind him frowning and 
evidently trying to catch my eye. But 
I kept my face turned aside so that I could 
not see her signal of distress and my eyes 
fixed on the young man Dixon. It was as 
good as a play. Harriet there, serious- 
minded, thinking I was being befooled, and 
the agent thinking he was befooling me, and 
I, thinking I was befooling both of them — 
and all of us wrong. It was very like life 
wherever you find it. 



CONTENTMENT 47 

Finally, I took the book which he had 
been urging upon me, at which Harriet 
coughed meaningly to attract my attention. 
She knew the danger when I really got my 
hands on a book. But I made up as inno- 
cent as a child. I opened the book almost at 
random — and it was as though, walking 
down a strange road, I had come upon an old 
tried friend not seen before in years. For 
there on the page before me I read : 

"The world is too much with us; late and soon, 
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers: 
Little we see in Nature that is ours; 
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! 
The sea that bares her bosom to the moon; 
The winds that will be howling at all hours, 
But are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; 
For this, for everything, we are out of tune; 
It moves us not." 

And as I read it came back to me — a 
scene like a picture — the place, the time, the 
very feel of the hour when I first saw those 
lines. Who shall say -that the past does not 
live! An odour will sometimes set the blood 
coursing in an old emotion, and a line of poetry 
is the resurrection and the life. For a moment 
I forgot Harriet and the agent, I forgot 



48 ADVENTURES IN 

myself, I even forgot the book on my knee — 
everything but that hour in the past — a 
view of shimmering hot housetops, the heat 
and dust and noise of an August evening in 
the city, the dumb weariness of it all, the 
loneliness, the longing for green fields; and 
then these great lines of Wordsworth, read 
for the first time, flooding in upon me: 

"Great God! I 'd rather be 
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn: 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; 
And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 

When I had finished I found myself stand- 
ing in my own room with one arm raised, and, 
I suspect, a trace of tears in my eyes — there 
before the agent and Harriet. I saw Harriet 
lift one hand and drop it hopelessly. She 
thought I was captured at last. I was past 
saving. And as I looked at the agent I saw 
"grim conquest glowing in his eye!" So I 
sat dow^n not a little embarrassed by my 
exhibition — when I had intended to be 
self -poised. 

"You like it, don't you?" said Mr. Dixon 
unctuously. 



CONTENTMENT 49 

''I don't see," I said earnestly, ''how you 
can afford to sell such things as this so 
cheap." 

''They are cheap," he admitted regretfully. 
I suppose he wished he had tried me with 
the half -morocco. 

"They are priceless," I said, "absolutely 
priceless. If you were the only man in the 
world who had that poem, I think I would 
deed you my farm for it." 

Mr. Dixon proceeded, as though it were all 
settled, to get out his black order book and 
open it briskly for business. He drew his 
fountain pen, capped it, and looked up at 
me expectantly. My feet actually seemed 
slipping into some irresistible whirlpool. How 
well he understood practical psychology! I 
struggled within myself, fearing engulfment: 
I was all but lost. 

"Shall I deliver the set at once," he said, 
" or can you wait until the first of February? " 

At that critical moment a floating spar of an 
idea swept my way and I seized upon it as the 
last hope of the lost. 

"I don't understand," I said, as though I 
had not heard his last question, "how you 
dare go about with all this treasure upon you. 




"Did you ever see a more beautiful binding?" 



ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 51 

Are you not afraid of being stopped in the 
road and robbed? Why, I've seen the time 
when, if I had known you carried such things 
as these, such cures for sick hearts, I think I 
should have stopped you myself!" 

''Say, you are an odd one," said Mr. Dixon. 

"Why do you sell such priceless things as 
these?" I asked, looking at him sharply. 

"Why do I sell them?" and he looked 
still more perplexed. "To make money, of 
course; same reason you raise corn." 

"But here is wealth," I said, pursuing my 
advantage. "If you have these you have 
something more valuable than money. ' ' 

Mr. Dixon politely said nothing. Like a 
wise angler, having failed to land me at the 
first rush, he let me have line. Then I thought 
of Ruskin's words, "Nor can any noble thing 
be wealth except to a noble person." And 
that prompted me to say to Mr. Dixon: 

"These things are not yours; they are 
mine. You never owned them; but I will 
sell them to you." 

He looked at me in amazement, and then 
glanced around — evidently to discover if 
there were a convenient way of escape. 

** You 're all straight, are you?" he asked 



52 ADVENTURES IN 

tapping his forehead; ''didn't anybody ever 
try to take you up ? " 

''The covers are yours," I continued as 
though I had not heard him, "the insides are 
mine and have been for a long time: that 
is why I proposed buying the covers 
separately. ' ' 

I opened his book again. I thought I 
would see what had been chosen for its 
pages. And I found there many fine and 
great things. 

"Let me read you this," I said to Mr. 
Dixon; " it has been mine for a long time. I 
will not sell it to you. I will give it to you 
outright. The best things are always given." 

Having some gift in imitating the Scotch 
dialect, I read: 

"November chill blaws loud wi' angry sugh; 

The short 'ning winter day is near a close; 
The miry beasts retreating frae the pleugh; 

The black'ning trains o' craws to their repose: 
The toil-worn Cotter frae his labour goes, 

This night his weekly moil is at an end, 
Collects his spades, his mattocks and his hoes, 

Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend, 
And weary, o'er the moor, his course does 

hameward bend." 

So I read "The Cotter's Saturday Night." 



CONTENTMENT 53 

I love the poem very much myself, some- 
times reading it aloud, not so much for the 
tenderness of its message, though I prize 
that, too, as for the wonder of its music. 

"Compar'd with these, Italian trills are tame; 
The tickl'd ear no heart-felt raptures raise." 

I suppose I showed my feeling in my voice. 
As I glanced up from time to time I saw the 
agent's face change, and his look deepen and 
the lips, usually so energetically tense, loosen 
with emotion. Surely no poem in all the 
language conveys so perfectly the simple love 
of the home, the quiet joys, hopes, pathos of 
those who live close to the soil. 

When I had finished — I stopped with the 
stanza beginning: 

"Then homeward all take off their sev'ral way"; 

the agent turned away his head trying to 
brave out his emotion. Most of us, Anglo- 
Saxons, tremble before a tear when we might 
fearlessly beard a tiger. 

I moved up nearer to the agent and put 
my hand on his knee; then I read two or 
three of the other things I found in his 
wonderful book. And once I had him laugh- 



54 ADVENTURES IN 

ing and once again I had the tears in his 
eyes. Oh, a simple young man, a httle 
crusty without, but soft inside — hke the 
rest of us. 

Well, it was amazing, once we began talking 
not of books but of life, how really eloquent 
and human he became. From being a distant 
and uncomfortable person, he became at once J 
like a near neighbour and friend. It was 
strange to me — as I have thought since — 
how he conveyed to us in few words the 
essential emotional note of his life. It was no 
violin tone, beautifully complex with har- 
monics, but the clear simple voice of the flute. 
It spoke of his wife and his baby girl and his 
home. The very incongruity of detail — he 
told us how he grew onions in his back yard — 
added somehow to the homely glamour of the 
vision which he gave us. The number of his 
house, the fact that he had a new cottage 
organ, and that the baby ran away and lost 
herself in Seventeenth Street — were all, 
curiously, fabrics of his emotion. 

It was beautiful to see commonplace facts 
grow phosphorescent in the heat of true feel- 
ing. How little we may come to know 
Romance by the cloak she wears and how 



CONTENTMENT 55 

humble must be he who would surprise the 
heart of her! 

It was, indeed, with an indescribable thrill 
that I heard him add the details, one by one 
— the mortgage on his place, now rapidly 
being paid off, the brother who was a plumber, 
the mother-in-law who was not a mother-in- 
law of the comic papers. And finally he 
showed us the picture of the wife and baby 
that he had in the cover of his watch; a fat 
baby with its head resting on its mother's 
shoulder. 

''Mister," he said, ''p'raps you think it's 
fun to ride around the country like I do, and 
be away from home most of the time. But 
it ain't. When I think of Minnie and the 
kid— '* 

He broke off sharply, as if he had suddenly 
remembered the shame of such confidences. 

"Sav," he asked, "what page is that poem 
on?" ' 

I told him. 

"One forty-six," he said. "When I get 
home I 'm going to read that to Minnie. She 
likes poetry and all such things. And where 's 
that other piece that tells how a man feels 
when he 's lonesome ? Say, that fellow knew ! " 



56 ADVENTURES IN 

We had a genuinely good time, the agent 
and I, and when he finally rose to go, I said: 

" Well, I 've sold you a new book." 

" I see now, mister, what you mean." 

I went down the path with him and began 
to unhitch his horse. 

"Let me, let me," he said eagerly. 

Then he shook hands, paused a moment 
awkwardly as if about to say something, then 
sprang into his buggy without saying it. 

When he had taken up his reins he remarked : 

"Say! but you 'd make an agent! You 'd 
h3^pnotise 'em." 

I recognised it as the greatest compliment 
he could pay me: the craft compliment. 

Then he drove off, but pulled up before he 
had gone five yards. He turned in his seat, 
one hand on the back of it, his whip raised. 

"Say!" he shouted, and when I walked up 
he looked at me with fine embarrassment. 

"Mister, perhaps you 'd accept one of these 
sets from Dixon free gratis, for nothing." 

"I understand," I said, "but you know 
I 'm giving the books to you — and I could n't 
take them back again." 

"Well," he said, "3'OU 're a good one, any- 
how. Good-bye again," and then, suddenly, 



CONTENTMENT 



57 



business naturally coming uppermost, he 
remarked with great enthusiasm: 

"You 've given me a new idea. Say, I '11 
sell 'em." 

"Carry them carefully, man," I called 
after him; "they are precious." 

So I went back to my work, thinking how 
many fine people there are in this world — 
if you scratch 'em deep enough. 




<?^.y. 



tj^ ^SiDOX 




" Horace ' hefted ' it " 



V 



THE AXE-HELVE 



April the i$th. 

THIS morning I broke my old axe handle. 
I went out early while the fog still filled 
the valley and the air was cool and moist as 
it had come fresh from the filter of the night. 
I drew a long breath and let my axe fall with 
all the force I could give it upon a new oak log. 
I swung it unnecessarily high for the joy of 
doing it and when it struck it communicated 

58 



ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 59 

a sharp yet not unpleasant sting to the 
palms of my hands. The handle broke short 
off at the point where the helve meets the 
steel. The blade was driven deep in the oak 
wood. I suppose I should have regretted 
my foolishness, but I did not. The handle 
was old and somewhat worn, and the accident 
gave me an indefinable satisfaction: the cul- 
mination of use, that final destruction which 
is the complement of great effort. 

This feeling was also partly prompted by 
the thought of the new helve I already had 
in store, awaiting just such a catastrophe. 
Having come somewhat painfully by that 
helve, I really wanted to see it in use. 

Last spring, walking in m^/ fields, I looked 
out along the fences for a well-fitted young 
hickory tree of thrifcy second growth, bare 
of knots at least head high, without the 
cracks or fissures of too rapid growth or the 
doziness of early transgression. What I de- 
sired was a fine, healthy tree fitted for a great 
purpose and I looked for it as I would look 
for a perfect man to save a failing cause. At 
last I found a sapling growing in one of the 
sheltered angles of my rail fence. It was set 
about by dry grass, overhung by a much 



6o ADVENTURES IN 

larger cherry tree, and bearing still its with- 
ered last year's leaves, worn diaphanous but 
curled delicately, and of a most beautiful 
ash gray colour, something like the fabric of 
a wasp's nest, only yellower. I gave it a 
shake and it sprung quickly under my hand 
like the muscle of a good horse. Its bark 
was smooth and trim, its bole well set and 
solid. 

A perfect tree! So I came up again with 
my short axe and after clearing away the 
grass and leaves with which the wind had 
mulched it, I cut into the clean white roots. 
I had no twinge of compunction, for was this 
not fulfillment? Nothing comes of sorrow 
for worthy sacrifice. When I had laid the 
tree low, I clipped off the lower branches, 
snapped off the top with a single clean stroke 
of the axe. and shouldered as pretty a second- 
growth sapling stick as anyone ever laid his 
eyes upon. 

I carried it down to my barn and put it on 
the open rafters over the cow stalls. A cow 
stable is warm and not too dry, so that a 
hickory log cures slowly without cracking or 
checking. There it lay for many weeks. 
Often I cast my eyes up at it with satisfaction, 



CONTENTMENT 6i 

watching the bark shrink and sHghtly deepen 
in colour, and once I cHmbed up where I 
could see the minute seams making way in 
the end of the stick. 

In the summer I brought the stick into the 
house, and put it in the dry, warm storeroom 
over the kitchen where I keep my seed corn. 
I do not suppose it really needed further 
attention, but sometimes when I chanced to 
go into the storeroom, I turned it over with 
my foot. I felt a sort of satisfaction in know- 
ing that it was in preparation for service: 
good material for useful work. So it lay 
during the autumn and far into the winter. 

One cold night when I sat comfortably at 
my fireplace, listening to the wind outside, 
and feeling all the ease of a man at peace with 
himself, my mind took flight to my snowy 
field sides and I thought of the trees there 
waiting and resting through the winter. So 
I came in imagination to the particular corner 
in the fence where I had cut my hickory sapling. 
Instantly I started up, much to Harriet's aston- 
ishment, and made my way mysteriously up 
the kitchen stairs. I would not tell what 
I was after: I felt it a sort of adventure, 
almost like the joy of seeing a friend long 



62 ADVENTURES IN 

forgotten. It was as if my hickory stick had 
cried out at last, after long chrysalishood : 

''I am ready." 

I stood it on end and struck it sharply with 
my knuckles: it rang out with a certain clear 
resonance. 

''I am ready." 

I sniffed at the end of it. It exhaled a 
peculiar good smell, as of old fields in the 
autumn. 

"I am ready." 

So I took it under my arm and carried it 
down. 

''Mercy, what are you going to do?" ex- 
claimed Harriet. 

"Deliberately, and with malice afore- 
thought," I responded, ''I am going to litter 
up your floor. I have decided to be reckless. 
I don't care what happens." 

Having made this declaration, which Har- 
riet received with becoming disdain, I laid 
the log by the fireplace — not too near — 
and went to fetch a saw, a hammer, a small 
v/edge, and a draw-shave. 

I split my log into as fine white sections as 
a man ever saw — every piece as straight as 
morality, and without so much as a sliver to 



CONTENTMENT 63 

mar it. Nothing is so satisfactory as to have 
a task come out in perfect time and in good 
order. The httle pieces of bark and sawdust 
I swept scrupulously into the fireplace, look- 
ing up from time to time to see how Harriet 
was taking it. Harriet was still disdainful. 

Making an axe-helve is like writing a poem 
(though I never wrote one). The material is 
free enough, but it takes a poet to use it. 
Some people imagine that any fine thought 
is poetry, but there was never a greater mis- 
take. A fine thought, to become poetry 
must be seasoned in the upper warm garrets 
of the mind for long and long, then it must be 
brought down and slowly carved into words, 
shaped with emotion, polished with love. 
Else it is no true poem. Some people imagine 
that any hickory stick will make an axe- 
helve. But this is far from the truth. When 
I had whittled away for several evenings 
with my draw- shave and jack-knife, both of 
which I keep sharpened to the keenest edge, 
I found that my work was not progressing as 
well as I had hoped. 

''This is more of a task," I remarked one 
evening, ''than I had imagined." 

Harriet, rocking placidly in her arm-chair, 



64 ADVENTURES IN 

was mending a number of pairs of new socks. 
Poor Harriet! Lacking enough old holes to 
occupy her energies, she mends holes that 
may possibly appear. A frugal person! 

''Well, David," she said, "I warned you 
that you could buy a helve cheaper than you 
could make it." 

''So I can buy a book cheaper than I can 
write it," I responded. 

I felt somewhat pleased with my return 
shot, though I took pains not to show it. I 
squinted along my hickory stick which was 
even then beginning to assume, rudely, the 
outlines of an axe-handle. I had made a 
prodigious pile of fine white shavings and I 
was tired, but quite suddenly there came over 
me a sort of love for that length of wood. 
I sprung it affectionately over m}^ knee, I 
rubbed it up and down with my hand, and 
then I set it in the corner behind the fireplace. 

"After all," I said, for I had really been 
disturbed by Harriet's remark — "after all, 
power over one thing gives us power over 
everything. When you mend socks pro- 
spectively — into futurity — Harriet, that is 
an evidence of true greatness." i 

"Sometimes I think it doesn't pay," 



CONTENTMENT 65 

remarked Harriet, though she was plainly 
pleased. 

''Pretty good socks," I said, *'can be 
bought for fifteen cents a pair." 

Harriet looked at me suspiciously, but I 
was as sober as the face of nature. 

For the next two or three evenings I let 
the axe-helve stand alone in the corner. I 
hardly looked at it, though once in a while, 
when occupied with some other work, I 
would remember, or rather half remember, that 
I had a pleasure in store for the evening. The 
very thought of sharp tools and something 
to make with them acts upon the imagination 
with peculiar zest. So we love to employ 
the keen edge of the mind upon a knotty and 
difficult subject. 

One evening the Scotch preacher came in. 
We love him very much, though he sometimes 
makes us laugh — perhaps, in part, because 
he makes us laugh. Externally he is a sort 
of human cocoanut, rough, brown, shaggy, 
but within he has the true milk of human 
kindness. Some of his qualities touch great- 
ness. His youth was spent in stony places 
where strong winds blew; the trees where he 
grew bore thorns; the soil where he dug was 



66 ADVENTURES IN 

full of roots. But the crop was human love! 
He possesses that quality, unusual in one bred 
exclusively in the country, of magnanimity 
toward the unlike. In the country we are 
tempted to throw stones at strange hats! 
But to the Scotch preacher every man in one 
way seems transparent to the soul. He sees 
the man himself, not his professions any more 
than his clothes. And I never knew anyone 
who had such an abiding disbelief in the 
wickedness of the human soul. Weakness he 
sees and comforts ; wickedness he cannot see. 

When he came in I was busy whittling my 
axe-helve, it being my pleasure at that mo- 
ment to make long, thin, curly shavings so 
light that many of them were caught on the 
hearth and bowled by the draught straight 
to fiery destruction. 

There is a noisy zest about the Scotch 
preacher: he comes in "stomping" as we say, 
he must clear his throat, he must strike his 
hands together ; he even seems noisy when he 
unwinds the thick red tippet which he wears 
wound many times around his neck. It 
takes him a long time to unwind it, and he 
accomplishes the task with many slow gyra- 
tions of his enormous rough head. When he 



CONTENTMENT 67 

sits down he takes merely the edge of the chair, 
spreads his stout legs apart, sits as straight 
as a post, and blows his nose with a noise like 
the falling of a tree. 

His interest in everything is prodigious. 
When he saw what I was doing he launched 
at once upon an account of the methods of 
axe-helving, ancient and modem, with true 
incidents of his childhood. 

"Man," he exclaimed, '* you Ve clean for- 
gotten one of the preenciple refinements of the 
art. When you chop, which hand do you 
hold down?" 

At the moment, I could n't have told to 
save my life, so we both got up on our feet 
and tried. 

"It's the right hand down," I decided; 
"that 's natural to me." 

" You 're a normal right-handed chopper, 
then," said the Scotch preacher, "as I was 
thinking. Now let me instruct you in the 
art. Being right-handed, your helve must 
bow out — so. No first-class chopper uses a 
straight handle." 

He fell to explaining, with gusto, the mys- 
teries of the bowed handle, and as I listened 
I felt a new and peculiar interest in my task. 



68 ADVENTURES IN 

This was a final perfection to be accomplished, 
the finality of technique! 

So we sat with our heads together talking 
helves and axes, axes with single blades and 
axes with double blades, and hand axes and 
great choppers' axes, and the science of felling 
trees, with the true philosophy of the last 
chip, and arguments as to the best procedure 
when a log begins to ''pinch" — until a 
listener would have thought that the art of 
the chopper included the whole philosophy 
of existence — as indeed it does, if you 
look at it in that way. Finally I rushed 
out and brought in my old axe-handle, 
and we set upon it like true artists, with 
critical proscription for being a trivial 
product of machinery. 

*'Man," exclaimed the preacher, *'it has 
no character. Now your helve here, being 
the vision of your brain and work of your 
hands, will interpret the thought of your 
heart." 

Before the Scotch preacher had finished 
his disquisition upon the art of helve-making 
and its relations with all other arts, I felt like 
Peary discovering the Pole. 

In the midst of the discourse, while I was 



CONTENTMENT 69 

soaring high, the Scotch preacher suddenly 
stopped, sat up, and struck his knee with a 
tremendous resounding smack. 

''Spoons!" he exclaimed. 

Harriet and I stopped and looked at him 
in astonishment. 

"Spoons," repeated Harriet. 

" Spoons," said the Scotch preacher. " I 've 
not once thought of my errand; and my wife 
told me to come straight home. I 'm more 
thoughtless every day!" 

Then he turned to Harriet: 

"I Ve been sent to borrow some spoons," 
he said. 

"Spoons!" exclaimed Harriet. 

"Spoons," answered the Scotch preacher. 
" We 've invited friends for dinner to-morrow, 
and we must have spoons." 

" But why — how — I thought " be- 
gan Harriet, still in astonishment. 

The Scotch preacher squared around toward 
her and cleared his throat. 

"It's the baptisms," he said: "when a 
baby is brought for baptism, of course it must 
have a baptismal gift. What is the best gift 
for a baby? A spoon. So we present it with 
a spoon. To-day we discovered we had only 




LET MY AXE FALL 



ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 71 

three spoons left, and company coming. 
Man, 'tis a proleefic neighbourhood." 

He heaved a great sigh. 

Harriet rushed out and made up a package. 
When she came in I thought it seemed sus- 
piciously large for spoons, but the Scotch 
preacher having again launched into the lore 
of the chopper, took it without at first per- 
ceiving anything strange. Five minutes after 
we had closed the door upon him he suddenly 
returned holding up the, package. 

''This is an uncommonly heavy package," 
he remarked; ''did I say table-spoons?" 

" Go on ! " commanded Harriet ; " your wife 
will understand." 

' ' All right — good-bye again, ' ' and his 
sturdy figure soon disappeared in the dark. 

"The impractical man!" exclaimed Har- 
riet. "People impose on him." 

"What was in that package, Harriet?" 

" Oh, I put in a few jars of jelly and a cake 
of honey." 

After a moment Harriet looked up from 
her work. 

" Do you known the greatest sorrow of the 
Scotch preacher and his wife?" 

"What is it?" I asked. 



72 ADVENTURES IN 

"They have no chick nor child of their 
own," said Harriet. 

It is prodigious, the amount of work re- 
quired to make a good axe-helve — I mean 
to make it according to one's standard. I 
had times of humorous discouragement and 
times of high elation when it seemed to me I 
could not work fast enough. Weeks passed 
when I did not touch the helve but left it 
standing quietly in the corner. Once or 
twice I took it out and walked about with it 
as a sort of cane, much to the secret amuse- 
ment, I think, of Harriet. At times Harriet 
takes a really wicked delight in her superiority. 

Early one morning in March the dawn 
came with a roaring wind, sleety snow drove 
down over the hill, the house creaked and 
complained in every clapboard. A blind 
of one of the upper windows, wrenched loose 
from its fastenings, was driven shut with such 
force that it broke a window pane. When 
I rushed up to discover the meaning of the 
clatter and to repair the damage, I found the 
floor covered with peculiar long fragments of 
glass — the pane having been broken inward 
from the centre. 



CONTENTMENT 73 

"Just what I have wanted," I said to 
myself. 

I selected a few of the best pieces and so 
eager was I to try them that I got out my 
axe-helve before breakfast and sat scratching 
away when Harriet came down. 

Nothing equals a bit of broken glass for 
putting on the final perfect touch to a work 
of art like an axe-helve. Nothing will so 
beautifully and delicately trim out the curves 
of the throat or give a smoother turn to the 
waist. So with care and an indescribable 
affection, I added the final touches, trimming 
the helve until it exactly fitted my hand. 
Often and often I tried it in pantomime, 
swinging nobly in the centre of the sitting- 
room (avoiding the lamp), attentive to the 
feel of my hand as it ran along the helve. I 
rubbed it down with fine sandpaper until it 
fairly shone with whiteness. Then I bor- 
rowed a red flannel cloth of Harriet and hav- 
ing added a few drops — not too much — of 
boiled oil, I rubbed the helve for all I was 
worth. This I continued for upward of an 
hour. At that time the axe-helve had taken 
on a yellowish shade, very clear and beautiful. 

I do not think I could have been prouder 



74 ADVENTURES IN 

if I had carved a statue or built a parthenon. 
I was consumed with vanity; but I set the 
new helve in the corner with the appearance 
of utter unconcern. 

''There," I remarked, "it's finished." 

I watched Harriet out of the corner of my 
eye: she made as if to speak and then held 
silent. 

That evening friend Horace came in. I 
was glad to see him. Horace is or was a 
famous chopper. I placed him at the fire- 
place where his eye, sooner or later, must fall 
upon my axe-helve. Oh, I worked out my 
designs! Presently he saw the helve, picked 
it up at once and turned it over in his hands. 
I had a suffocating, not unhumorous, sense 
of self-consciousness. I know how a poet 
must feel at hearing his first poem read aloud 
by some other person who does not know its 
authorship. I suffer and thrill with the 
novelist who sees a stranger purchase his 
book in a book-shop. I felt as though I 
stood that moment before the Great Judge. 

Horace "hefted" it and balanced it, and 
squinted along it ; he rubbed it with his thumb, 
he rested one end of it on the floor and sprung 
it roughly. 



CONTENTMENT JS 

*' David," he said severely, ''where did 
you git this?" 

Once when I was a boy I came home with 
my hair wet. My father asked: 

''David, have you been swimming?" 

I had exactly the same feeling when Horace 
asked his question. Now T am, generally 
speaking, a truthful man. I have written 
a good deal about the immorality, the un- 
wisdom, the short-sightedness, the sinful waste- 
fulness of a lie. But at that moment, if 
Harriet had not been present — and that 
illustrates one of the purposes of society, to 
bolster up a man's morals — I should have 
evolved as large and perfect a prevarication 
as it lay within me to do — cheerfully. But 
I felt Harriet's moral eye upon me: I was a 
coward as well as a sinner. I faltered so long 
that Horace finally looked around at me. 

Horace has no poetry in his soul, neither 
does he understand the philosophy of im- 
perfection nor the art of irregularity. 

It is a tender shoot, easily blasted by cold 
winds, the creative instinct: but persistent. 
It has many adventitious buds. A late frost, 



76 ADVENTURES IN 

destroying the freshness of its early verdure, 
may be the means of a richer growth in later 
and more favourable days. 

» 

For a week I left my helve standing there 
in the corner. I did not even look at it. I 
was slain. I even thought of getting up in 
the night and putting the helve on the coals 
— secretly. Then, suddenly, one morning, 
I took it up not at all tenderly, indeed with 
a humorous appreciation of my own absurd- 
ities, and carried it out into the yard. An 
axe-helve is not a mere ornament but a thing 
of sober purpose. The test, after all, of axe- 
helves is not sublime perfection, but service. 
We may easily find flaws in the verse of the 
master — how far the rhythm fails of the 
final perfect music, how often uncertain the 
rhyme — but it bears within it, hidden yet 
evident, that certain incalculable fire which 
kindles and will continue to kindle the souls 
of men. The final test is not the perfection 
of precedent, not regularity, but life, spirit. 

It was one of those perfect, sunny, calm 
mornings that sometimes come in early 
April: the zest of winter yet in the air, but a 
promise of summer. 



CONTENTMENT 77 

I built a fire of oak chips in the middle of 
the yard, between two flat stones. I brought 
out my old axe, and when the fire had burned 
down somewhat, leaving a foundation of hot 
coals, I thrust the eye of the axe into the fire. 
The blade rested on one of the flat stones, and 
I kept it covered with wet rags in order that 
it might not heat sufficiently to destroy the 
temper of the steel. Harriet's old gray hen, 
a garrulous fowl, came and stood on one leg 
and looked at me first with one eye and then 
with the other. She asked innumerable im- 
pertinent questions and was generally dis- 
agreeable. 

''I am sorry, madam," I said finally, ''but 
I have grown adamant to criticism. I have 
done my work as well as it lies in me to do it. 
It is the part of sanity to throw it aside with- 
out compunction. A work must prove itself. 
Shoo!" 

I said this with such conclusiveness and 
vigour that the critical old hen departed 
hastily with ruffled feathers. 

So I sat there in the glorious perfection of 
the forenoon, the great day open around me, 
a few small clouds abroad in the highest sky, 
and all the earth radiant with sunshine. The 



78 ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 

last snow of winter was gone, the sap ran in 
the trees, the cows fed further afield. 

When the eye of the axe was sufficiently 
expanded by the heat I drew it quickly from 
the fire and drove home the helve which I 
had already whittled down to the exact size. 
I had a hickory wedge prepared, and it was 
the work of ten seconds to drive it into the 
cleft at the lower end of the helve until the 
eye of the axe was completely and perfectly 
filled. Upon cooling the steel shrunk upon 
the wood, clasping it with such firmness that 
nothing short of fire could ever dislodge it. 
Then, carefully, with knife and sandpaper I 
polished off the wood around the steel of the 
axe until I had made as good a job of it as 
lay within my power. 

So I carried the axe to my log-pile. I 
swung it above my head and the feel of it was 
good in my hands. The blade struck deep 
into the oak wood. And I said to myself 
with satisfaction: 

"It serves the purpose/' 




VI 



THE MARSH DITCH 



"If the day and the night are such that you greet them 
with joy and Hfe emits a fragrance Hke flowers and sweet- 
smelling herbs — is more elastic, more starry, more im- 
mortal — that is your Success." 



IN ALL the days of my life I have never 
been so well content as I am this spring. 
Last summer I thought I was happy, the fall 
gave me a finality of satisfaction, the winter 
imparted perspective, but spring conveys a 
wholly new sense of life, a quickening the like 

79 



So ADVENTURES IN 

of which I never before experienced. It 
seems to me that everything in the world is 
more interesting, more vital, more significant. 
I feel like "waving aside all roofs," in the way 
of Le Sage's Asmodeus. 

I even cease to fear Mrs. Horace, who is 
quite the most formidable person in this 
neighbourhood. She is so avaricious in the 
saving of souls — and so covetous of mine, 
which I wish especially to retain. When I 
see her coming across the hill I feel like run- 
ning and hiding, and if I were as bold as a 
boy, I should do it, but being a grown-up 
coward I remain and dissemble. 

She came over this morning. When I 
beheld her afar off, I drew a long breath: 
''One thousand," I quoted to myself, ''shall 
flee at the rebuke of one." 

In calmness I waited. She came with 
colours flying and hurled her biblical lance. 
When I withstood the shock with unexpected 
jauntiness, for I usually fall dead at once, 
she looked at me with severity and said: 

"Mr. Grayson, you are a materialist." 

"You have shot me with a name," I replied. 
"I am unhurt." 

It would be impossible to slay me on 



CONTENTMENT 8i 

a day like this. On a day like this I am 
immortal. 

It comes to me as the wonder of wonders, 
these spring days, how surely everything, 
spiritual as well as material, proceeds out of 
the earth. I have times of sheer Paganism 
when I could bow and touch my face to the 
warm bare soil. We are so often ashamed of 
the Earth — the soil of it, the sweat of it, the 
good common coarseness of it. To us in our 
fine raiment and soft manners, it seems in- 
delicate. Instead of seeking that association 
with the earth which is the renewal of life, 
we devise ourselves distant palaces and seek 
strange pleasures. How often and sadly we 
repeat the life story of the yellow dodder of 
the moist lanes of my lower farm. It springs 
up fresh and clean from the earth itself, and 
spreads its clinging viny stems over the hospita- 
ble wild balsam and golden rod. In a week's 
time, having reached the warm sunshine of 
the upper air, it forgets its humble beginnings. 
Its roots wither swiftly and die out, but the 
sickly yellow stems continue to flourish and 
spread, drawing their nourishment not from 
the soil itself, but by strangling and sucking 
the life juices of the hosts on which it feeds. 



82 ADVENTURES IN 

I have seen whole byways covered thus 
with yellow dodder — rootless, leafless, par- 
asitic — reaching up to the sunlight, quite 
cutting off and smothering the plants which 
gave it life. A week or two it flourishes and 
then most of it perishes miserably. So many 
of us come to be like that: so much of our 
civilization is like that. Men and women 
there are — the pity of it — who, eating 
plentifully, have never themselves taken a 
mouthful from the earth. They have never 
known a moment's real life of their own. 
Lying up to the sun in warmth and comfort 
— but leafless — they do not think of the 
hosts under them, smothered, strangled, 
starved. They take nothing at first hand. 
They experience described emotion, and 
think prepared thoughts. They live not in 
life, but in printed reports of life. They 
gather the odour of odours, not the odour 
itself: they do not hear, they overhear. A 
poor, sad, second-rate existence! 

Bring out your social remedies! They will 
fail, they will fail, every one, until each man 
has his feet somewhere upon the soil! 

My wild plum trees grow in the coarse 
earth, among excrementitious mould, a phys- 



CONTENTMENT 83 

ical life which finally blossoms and exhales 
its perfect odour: which ultimately bears the 
seed of its immortality. 

Human happiness is the true odour of 
growth, the sweet exhalation of work: and 
the seed of human immortality is borne se- 
cretly within the coarse and mortal husk. 
So many of us crave the odour without cul- 
tivating the earthly growth from which it 
proceeds: so many, wasting mortality, expect 
immortality! 

"Why," asks Charles Baxter, "do 

you always put the end of your stories first ? ' ' 

"You may be thankful," I replied, "that 
T do not make my remarks all endings. End- 
ings are so much more interesting than be- 
ginnings." 

Without looking up from the buggy he 
was mending, Charles Baxter intimated that 
my way had at least one advantage: one 
always knew, he said, that I really had an 
end in view — and hope deferred, he said 

How surely, soundly, deeply, the phys- 
ical underlies the spiritual. This morning I 
was up and out at half -past four, as perfect 
a morning as I ever saw: mists yet huddled 
in the low spots, the sun coming up over the 



84 ADVENTURES IN 

hill, and all the earth fresh with moisture, 
sweet with good odours, and musical with 
early bird-notes. 

It is the time of the spring just after the 
last seeding and before the early haying: a 
catch-breath in the farmer's vear. I have 
been utilising it in digging a drainage ditch at 
the lower end of my farm. A spot of marsh 
grass and blue flags occupies nearly half an 
acre of good land and I have been planning 
ever since I bought the place to open a drain 
from its lower edge to the creek, supplement- 
ing it in the field above, if necessary, with 
submerged tiling. I surveyed it carefully 
several weeks ago and drew plans and con- 
tours of the work as though it were an inter- 
oceanic canal. I find it a real delight to 
work out in the earth itself the details of 
the drawing. 

This morning, after hastening with the 
chores, I took my bag and my spade on my 
shoulder and set off (in rubber boots) for the 
ditch. My way lay along the margin of my 
cornfield in the deep grass. On my right as 
I walked was the old rail fence full of thrifty 
young hickory and cherry trees with here and 
there a clump of blackberry bushes. The 



CONTENTMENT 85 

trees beyond the fence cut off the sunrise so 
that I walked in the cool broad shadows. On 
my left stretched the cornfield of my plant- 
ing, the young corn well up, very attractive 
and hopeful, my really frightful scarecrow 
standing guard on the knoll, a wisp of 
straw sticking up through a hole in his hat 
and his crooked thumbs turned down — 
**No mercy." 

* 'Surely no corn ever before grew like this," 
I said to myself. ''To-morrow I must begin 
cultivating again. " 

So I looked up and about me — not to 
miss anything of the morning — and I drew 
in a good big breath and I thought the world 
had never been so open to my senses. 

I wonder why it is that the sense of smell 
is so commonly under-regarded. To me it 
is the source of some of my greatest pleasures. 
No one of the senses is more often allied with 
robustity of physical health. A man who 
smells acutely may be set down as enjoying 
that which is normal, plain, wholesome. He 
does not require seasoning : the ordinary earth 
is good enough for him. He is likely to be 
sane — which means sound, healthy — in his 
outlook upon life. 



86 ADVENTURES IN 

Of all hours of the day there is none like the 
early morning for downright good odours — ■ 
the morning before eating. Fresh from sleep 
and unclogged with food a man's senses cut 
like knives. The whole world comes in 
upon him. A still morning is best, for the 
mists and the moisture seem to retain the 
odours which they have distilled through the 
night. Upon a breezy morning one is likely 
to get a single predominant odour as of clover 
when the wind blows across a hay field or of 
apple blossoms when the wind comes through 
the orchard, but upon a perfectly still morn- 
ing, it is wonderful how the odours arrange 
themselves in upright strata, so that one 
walking passes through them as from room 
to room in a marvellous temple of fragrance. 
(I should have said, I think, if I had not been 
on my way to dig a ditch, that it was like turn- 
ing the leaves of some delicate voliime of 
lyrics!) 

So it was this morning. As I walked along 
the margin of my field I was conscious, at 
first, coming within the shadows of the wood, 
of the cool, heavy aroma which one associates 
with the night: as of moist woods and earth 
mould. The penetrating scent of the night 



CONTENTMENT 87 

remains long after the sights and sounds of it 
have disappeared. In sunny spots I had the 
fragrance of the open cornfield, the aromatic 
breath of the brown earth, giving curiously 
the sense of fecundity — a warm, generous 
odour of daylight and sunshine. Down the 
field, toward the corner, cutting in sharply, 
as though a door opened (or a page turned to 
another lyric), came the cloying, sweet fra- 
grance of wild crab-apple blossoms, almost 
tropical in their richness, and below that, as 
I came to my work, the thin acrid smell of the 
marsh, the place of the rushes and the flags 
and the frogs. 

How few of us really use our senses! I 
mean give ourselves fully at any time to 
the occupation of the senses. We do not 
expect to understand a treatise on Econo- 
mics without applying our minds to it, nor 
can we really smell or hear or see or 
feel without every faculty alert. Through 
sheer indolence we miss half the joy of the 
world ! 

Often as I work I stop to see: really see: 
see everything, or to listen, and it is the won- 
der of wonders, how much there is in this 
old world which we never dreamed of, how 



88 ADVENTURES IN 

many beautiful, curious, interesting sights 
and sounds there are which ordinarily make 
no impression upon our clogged, overfed and 
preoccupied minds. I have also had the 
feeling — it may be unscientific but it is 
comforting — that any man might see like 
an Indian or smell like a hound if he 
gave to the senses the brains which the 
Indian and the hound apply to them. And 
I 'm pretty sure about the Indian! It is 
marvellous what a man can do when he puts 
his entire mind upon one faculty and bears 
down hard. 

So I walked this morning, not hearing 
nor seeing, but smelling. Without desiring 
to stir up strife among the peaceful senses, 
there is this further marvel of the sense of 
smell. No other possesses such an after-call. 
Sight preserves pictures: the complete view 
of the aspect of objects, but it is photographic 
and external. Hearing deals in echoes, but 
the sense of smell, while saving no vision of a 
place or a person, will re-create in a way almost 
miraculous the inner emotion of a particular 
time or place. I know of nothing that will 
so *' create an appetite under the ribs of death." 

Only a short time ago I passed an open 



CONTENTMENT 89 

doorway in the town. I was busy with er- 
rands, my mind fully engaged, but suddenly I 
caught an odour from somewhere within the 
building I was passing. I stopped! It was 
as if in that moment I lost twenty years of 
my life: I was a boy again, living and feeling 
a particular mstant at the time of my father' s 
death. Every emotion of that occasion, not 
recalled in years, returned to me sharply and 
clearly as though I experienced it for the first 
time. It was a peculiar emotion: the first 
time I had ever felt the oppression of space — 
can I describe it ? — the utter bigness of the 
world and the aloofness of myself, a little boy, 
within it — now that my father was gone. It 
was not at that moment sorrow, nor remorse, 
nor love : it was an inexpressible cold terror — 
that anywhere I might go in the world, I 
should still be alone ! 

And there I stood, a man grown, shaking 
in the sunshine with that old boyish emotion 
brought back to me by an odour! Often 
and often have I known this strange re- 
kindling of dead fires. And I have thought 
how, if our senses were really perfect, we 
might lose nothing, out of our lives: neither 
sights, nor sounds, nor emotions: a sort of 



go ADVENTURES IN 

mortal immortality. Was not Shakespeare 
great because he lost less of the savings of 
his senses than other men? What a wonder- 
ful seer, hearer, smeller, taster, feeler, he 
must have been — and how, all the time, his 
mind must have played upon the gatherings 
of his senses! All scenes, all men, the very 
turn of a head, the exact sound of a voice, 
the taste of food, the feel of the world — all 
the emotions of his life must he have had 
there before him as he wrote, his great mind 
playing upon them, reconstructing, re-creat- 
ing and putting them down hot upon his 
pages. There is nothing strange about great 
men; they are like us, only deeper, higher, 
broader: they think as we do, but with more 
intensity: they suffer as we do, more keenly: 
they love as we do, more tenderly. 

I may be over-glorifying the sense of smell, 
but it is only because I walked this morning 
in a world of odours. The greatest of the 
senses, of course, is not smell or hearing, but 
sight. What would not any man exchange 
for that: for the faces one loves, for the scenes 
one holds most dear, for all that is beautiful 
and changeable and beyond description? The 
Scotch Preacher says that the saddest lines 



CONTENTMENT 91 

in all literature are those of Milton, writing of 
his blindness. 

"Seasons return; but not to me returns 
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, 
Or sight of vernal bloom or Summer's rose, 
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine." 



I have wandered a long way from 



ditch-digging, but not wholly without in- 
tention. Sooner or later I try to get back 
into the main road. I throw down my spade 
in the wet trampled grass at the edge of 
the ditch. I take off my coat and hang it 
over a limb of the little hawthorn tree. I 
put my bag near it. I roll up the sleeves 
of my flannel shirt: I give my hat a twirl; 
I 'm ready for work. 

The senses are the tools by which 

we lay hold upon the world: they are the 
implements of consciousness and growth. 
So long as they are used upon the good earth 
— used to wholesome weariness — they re- 
main healthy, they yield enjoyment, they 
nourish growth ; but let them once be removed 
from their natural employment and they turn 
and feed upon themseVes, they seek the 
stimulation of luxury, they wallow in their 



92 ADVENTURES IN 

own corruption, and finally, worn out, perish 
from off the earth which they have not 
appreciated. Vice is ever the senses gone 
astray. 

So I dug. There is something fine 

in hard physical labour, straight ahead: no 
brain used, just muscles. I stood ankle- 
deep in the cool water: every spadeful came 
out with a smack, and as I turned it over at 
the edge of the ditch small turgid rivulets 
coursed back again. I did not think of 
anything in particular. I dug. A peculiar 
joy attends the very pull of the muscles. I 
drove the spade home with one foot, then I 
bent and lifted and turned with a sort of 
physical satisfaction difficult to describe. At 
first I had the cool of the morning, but by 
seven o'clock the day was hot enough! I 
opened the breast of my shirt, gave my sleeves 
another roll, and went at it again for half an 
hour, until I dripped with perspiration. 

**I will knock ofi," I said, so I used my 
spade as a ladder and climbed out of the 
ditch. Being very thirsty, I walked down 
through the marshy valley to the clump of 
alders which grows along the creek. I fol- 
lowed a cow-path through the thicket and 



CONTENTMENT 93 

came to the creek side, where I knelt on a 
log and took a good long drink. Then I 
soused my head in the cool stream, dashed 
the water upon my arms and came up dripping 
and gasping! Oh, but it was fine! 

So I came back to the hawthorn tree, where 
I sat down comfortably and stretched my legs. 
There is a poem in stretched legs — after hard 
digging — but I can't write it, though I can 
feel it ! I got my bag and took out a half loaf 
of Harriet's bread. Breaking off big crude 
pieces, I ate it there in the shade. How rarely 
we taste the real taste of bread ! We disguise 
it with butter, we toast it, we eat it with milk 
or fruit. We even soak it with gravy (here 
in the country where we are n't at all polite 
— but very comfortable), so that we never 
get the downright delicious taste of the bread 
itself. I was hungry this morning and I ate 
my half loaf to the last crumb — and wanted 
more. Then I lay down for a moment in 
the shade and looked up into the sky through 
the thin outer branches of the hawthorn. A 
turkey buzzard was lazily circling cloud-high 
above me : a frog boomed intermittently from 
the little marsh, and there were bees at work 
in the blossoms. 



94 ADVENTURES IN 

1 had another drink at the creek and 



went back somewhat reluctantly, I confess, 
to the work. It was hot, and the first joy of 
effort had worn off. But the ditch was to be 
dug and I went at it again. One becomes 
a sort of machine — unthinking, mechanical : 
and yet intense physical work, though mak- 
ing no immediate impression on the mind, 
often lingers in the consciousness. I find 
that sometimes I can remember and enjoy 
for long afterward every separate step in a 
task. 

It is curious, hard physical labour! One 
actually stops thinking. I often work long 
without any thought whatever, so far as I 
know, save that connected with the monot- 
onous repetition of the labour itself — down 
with the spade, out with it, up with it, 
over with it — and repeat. And yet some- 
times — mostly in the forenoon when I am 
not at all tired — I will suddenly have a 
sense as of the world opening around me — 
a sense of its beauty and its meanings — 
giving me a peculiar deep happiness, that is 
near complete content 

Happiness, I have discovered, is nearly 
always a rebound from hard work. It is 



CONTENTMENT 95 

one of the follies of men to imagine that 
they can enjoy mere thought, or emotion, 
or sentiment! As well try to eat beauty! 
For happiness must be tricked! She loves 
to see men at work. She loves sweat, weari- 
ness, self-sacrifice. She will be found not in 
palaces but lurking in cornfields and factories 
and hovering over littered desks: she crowns 
the unconscious head of the busy child. If 
you look up suddenly from hard work you will 
see her, but if you look too long she fades 
sorrowfully away. 

Down toward the town there is a 

little factory for barrel hoops and staves. 
It has one of the most musical whistles I 
ever heard in my life. It toots at exactly 
twelve o'clock: blessed sound! The last half- 
hour at ditch-digging is a hard, slow pull. 
I 'm warm and tired, but I stick down to it 
and wait with straining ear for the music. 
At the very first note of that whistle I 
drop my spade. I will even empty out a 
4oad of dirt half way up rather than expend 
another ounce of energy; and I spring out 
of the ditch and start for home with a 
single desire in my heart — or possibly 
lower down. And Harriet, standing in the 



96 ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 

doorway, seems to me a sort of angel — a 
culinary angel! 

Talk of joy: there may be things better 
than beef stew and baked potatoes and 
home-made bread — there may be 



^yy 





VII 



AN ARGUMENT WITH A MILLIONNAIRE 



"Let the mighty and great 
Roll in splendour and state, 
I envy them not, I declare it. 
I eat my own lamb, 
My own chicken and ham, 
I shear my own sheep and wear it. 

I have lawns, I have bowers, 

I have fruits, I have flowers. 

The lark is my morning charmer; 

So you jolly dogs now. 

Here 's God bless the plow — 

Long life and content to the farmer." 

— Rhyme on an old pitcher of English pottery. 

1HAVE been hearing of John Stark- 
weather ever since I came here. He 
is a most important personage in this com- 
munity. He is rich. Horace especially loves 

97 



98 ADVENTURES IN 

to talk about him. Give Horace half a chance, 
whether the subject be pigs or churches, and 
he will break in somewhere with the remark: 
*'As I was saying to Mr. Starkweather — " 
or, ''Mr. Starkweather says to me — " How 
we love to shine by reflected glory! Even 
Harriet has not gone unscathed ; she, too, has 
been affected by the bacillus of admiration. 
She has wanted to know several times if I 
saw John Starkweather drive by: ''the finest 
span of horses in this country," she says, and 
''did you see his daughter?" Much other 
information concerning the Starkweather 
household, culinary and otherwise, is current 
among our hills. We know accurately the 
number of Mr. Starkweather's bedrooms, 
we can tell how much coal he uses in win- 
ter and how many tons of ice in summer, 
and upon such important premises we argue 
his riches. 

Several times I have passed John Stark- 
weather's home. It lies between my farm 
and the town, though not on the direct road, 
and it is really beautiful with the groomed 
and guided beauty possible to wealth. A 
stately old house with a huge end chimney 
of red brick stands with dignity well back 



CONTENTMENT 99 

from the road; round about lie pleasant 
lawns that once were cornfields: and there 
are drives and walks and exotic shrubs. At 
first, loving my own hills so well, I was puzzled 
to understand why I should also enjoy Stark- 
weather's groomed surroundings. But it 
came to me that after all, much as we may 
love wildness, we are not wild, nor our works. 
What more artificial than a house, or a barn, 
or a fence ? And the greater and more formal 
the house, the more formal indeed must be 
the nearer natural environments. Perhaps 
the hand of man might well have been less 
evident in developing the surroundings of the 
Starkweather home — for art, dealing with 
nature, is so often too accomplished! 

But I enjoy the Starkweather place and 
as I look in from the road, I sometimes think 
to myself with satisfaction: ''Here is this 
rich man who has paid his thousands to 
make the beauty which I pass and take for 
nothing — and having taken, leave as much 
behind." And I wonder sometimes whether 
he, inside his fences, gets more joy of it than 
I, who walk the roads outside. Anyway, I 
am grateful to him for using his riches so 
much to my advantage. 



TOO ADVENTURES IN 

On fine mornings John Starkweather some- 
times comes out in his sHppers, bare-headed, 
his white vest gleaming in the sunshine, and 
walks slowly around his garden. Charles 
Baxter says that on these occasions he is 
asking his gardener the names of the vege- 
tables. However that may be, he has seemed 
to our community the very incarnation of 
contentment and prosperity — his position 
the acme of desirability. 

What was my astonishment, then, the 
other morning to see John Starkweather 
coming down the pasture lane through my 
farm. I knew him afar off. though I had 
never met him. May I express the inex- 
pressible when I say he had a rich look; he 
walked rich, there was richness in the con- 
fident crook of his elbow, and in the positive 
twitch of the stick he carried: a man accus- 
tomed to having doors opened before he 
knocked. I stood there a moment and 
looked up the hill at him, and I felt that 
profound curiosity which every one of us 
feels every day of his life to know something 
of the inner impulses which stir his nearest 
neighbour. I should have liked to know 
John Starkweather; but I thought to myself 



CONTENTMENT loi 

as I have thought so many times how surely- 
one comes finally to imitate his surroundings. 
A farmer grows to be a part of his farm; the 
sawdust on his coat is not the most distinctive 
insignia of the carpenter; the poet writes his 
truest lines upon his own countenance. Peo- 
ple passing in my road take me to be a part 
of this natural scene. I suppose I seem to 
them as a partridge squatting among dry 
grass and leaves, so like the grass and leaves 
as to be invisible. We all come to be marked 
upon by nature and dismissed — how care- 
lessly! — as genera or species. And is it not 
the primal struggle of man to escape classifi- 
cation, to form new differentiations? 

Sometimes — I confess it — when I see 
one passing in my road, I feel like hailing 
him and saying: 

"Friend, I am not all farmer. I, too, 
am a person; I am different and curious. 
I am full of red blood, I like people, all sorts 
of people; if you are not interested in me, at 
least I am intensely interested in you. Come 
over now and let 's talk! " 

So we are all of us calling and calling across 
the incalculable gulfs which separate us even 
from our nearest friends! 



I02 ADVENTURES IN 

Once or twice this feeling has been so 
real to me that I 've been near to the point 
of hailing utter strangers — only to be in- 
stantly overcome with a sense of the hu- 
morous absurdity of such an enterprise. So 
I laugh it off and I say to myself: 

" Steady now: the man is going to town 
to sell a pig; he is coming back with ten 
pounds of sugar, five of salt pork, a can. 
of coffee and some new blades for his mow- 
ing machine. He hasn't time for talk" 
— and so I come down with a bump to my 
digging, or hoeing, or chopping, or whatever 
it is. 

Here I Ve left John Starkweather in 

my pasture while I remark to the extent of 
a page or two that I did n't expect him to 
see me when he went by. 

I assumed that he was out for a walk, per- 
haps to enliven a worn appetite (do you know, 
confidentially, I 've had some pleasure in 
times past in reflecting upon the jaded appe- 
tites of millionnaires!), and that he would 
pass out by my lane to the country road; 
but instead of that, what should he do but 
climb the yard fence and walk over toward 
the barn where I was at work. 



CONTENTMENT 103 

Perhaps I was not consumed with ex- 
citement: here was fresh adventure! 

''A farmer," I said to myself with ex- 
ultation, "has only to wait long enough and 
all the world comes his way." 

I had just begun to grease my farm wagon 
and was experiencing some difficulty in lifting 
and steadying the heavy rear axle while I 
took off the wheel. I kept busily at work, 
pretending (such is the perversity of the 
human mind) that I did not see Mr. Stark- 
weather. He stood for a moment watching 
me; then he said: 

"Good morning, sir." 

I looked up and said: 

" Oh, good morning! " 

"Nice little farm you have here." 

"It's enough for me," I replied. I did 
not especially like the "little." One is 
human. 

Then I had an absurd inspiration: he stood 
there so trim and jaunty and prosperous. So 
rich! I had a good look at him. He was dressed 
in a woollen jacket coat, knee-trousers and 
leggins; on his head he wore a jaunty, cocky 
little Scotch cap; a man, I should judge, about 
fifty years old, well-fed and hearty in appear- 



I04 ADVENTURES IN 

ance, with grayish hair and a good-humoured 
eye. I acted on my inspiration: 

** You've arrived," I said, ''at the psy- 
chological moment." 

"How's that?" 

''Take hold here and help me lift this axle 
and steady it I 'm having a hard time 
of it." 

The look of astonishment in his coun- 
tenance was beautiful to see. 

For a moment failure stared me in the 
face. His expression said with emphasis: 
"Perhaps you don't know who I am." But 
I looked at him with the greatest good feel- 
ing and my expression said, or I meant it 
to say: "To be sure I don't: and what dif- 
ference does it make, anyway!" 

"You take hold there," I said, without wait- 
ing for him to catch his breath, "and I '11 get 
hold here. Together we can easily get the 
wheel off." 

Without a word he set his cane against 
the bam and bent his back, up came the 
axle and I propped it with a board. 

"Now," I said, "you hang on there and 
steady it while I get the wheel off " — though, 
indeed, it did n't really need much steadying. 



CONTENTMENT 105 

As I straightened up, whom should I see 
but Haniet standing transfixed in the path- 
way half way down to the barn, transfixed 
with horror. She had recognised John Stark- 
weather and had heard at least part of what 
I said to him, and the vision of that im- 
portant man bending his back to help lift the 
axle of my old wagon was too terrible! She 
caught my eye and pointed and mouthed. 
When I smiled and nodded, John Starkweather 
straightened up and looked around. 

''Don't, on your life," I warned, ''let go 
of that axle." 

He held on and Harriet turned and re- 
treated ingloriously. John Starkweather's 
face was a study! 

"Did you ever grease a wagon?" I asked 
him genially. 

"Never," he said. 

"There's more of an art in it than you 
think," I said, and as I worked I talked to him 
of the lore of axle-grease and showed him ex- 
actly how to put it on — neither too much nor 
too little, and so that it would distribute itself 
evenly when the wheel was replaced. 

"There 's a right way of doing everything," 
I observed. 



io6 ADVENTURES IN 

''That's so," said John Starkweather: ''if 
I could only get workmen that believed it." 

By that time I could see that he was be- 
ginning to be interested. I put back the 
wheel, gave it a light turn and screwed on 
the nut. He helped me with the other end 
of the axle with all good humour. 

"Perhaps," I said, as engagingly as I knew 
how, "you'd like to try the art yourself? 
You take the grease this time and I '11 steady 
the wagon." 

"All right!" he said, laughing, "I'm in 
for anything." 

He took the grease box and the paddle 
— less gingerly than I thought he would. 

"Is that right?" he demanded, and so 
he put on the grease. And oh, it was good 
to see Harriet in the doorway! 

"Steady there," I said, "not so much at 
the end: now put the box down on the reach." 

And so together we greased the wagon, 
talking all the time in the friendliest way. 
I actually believe that he was having a pretty 
good time. At least it had the virtue of 
unexpectedness. He wasn't bored! 

When he had finished we both straight- 
ened our backs and looked at each other. 



CONTENTMENT 107 

There was a twinkle in his eye: then we 
both laughed. ''He's all right," I said to 
myself. I held up my hands, then he held 
up his: it was hardly necessary to prove 
that wagon-greasing was not a delicate 
operation. 

'' It 's a good wholesome sign," I said, ''but 
it '11 come off. Do you happen to remember 
a story of Tolstoi's called 'Ivan the Fool' ?" 

("What is a farmer doing quoting Tolstoi!*' 
remarked his countenance — though he said 
not a word.) 

"In the kingdom of Ivan, you remember," 
I said, " it was the rule that whoever had 
hard places on his hands came to table, but 
whoever had not must eat what the others 
left." 

Thus I led him up to the back steps and 
poured him a basin of hot water — which I 
brought myself from the kitchen, Harriet 
having marvellously and completely disap- 
peared. We both washed our hands, talking 
with great good humour. 

When we had finished I said: 

" Sit down, friend, if you 've time, and let 's 
talk." 

So he sat down on one of the logs of my 



io8 ADVENTURES IN 

woodpile: a solid sort of man, rather warm 
after his recent activities. He looked me 
over with some interest and, I thought, 
friendliness. 

*'Why does a man like you," he asked 
finally, "waste himself on a little farm back 
here in the country?" 

For a single instant I came nearer to being 
angry than I have been for a long time. Waste 
myself ! So we are judged without knowledge. 
I had a sudden impulse to demolish him (if 
I could) with the nearest sarcasms I could 
lay hand to. He was so sure of himself! 
''Oh well," I thought, with vainglorious 
superiority, ''he doesn't know." So I said: 

"What would you have me be — a mil- 
lionnaire?" 

He smiled, but with a sort of sincerity. 

"You might be," he said: "who can tell!" 

I laughed outright : the humour of it struck 
me as delicious. Here I had been, ever since 
I first heard of John Starkweather, rather 
gloating over him as a poor suffering million- 
naire (of course millionnaires are unhappy), 
and there he sat, ruddy of face and hearty of 
body, pitying me for a poor unfortunate far- 
mer back here in the country! Curious, this 



CONTENTMENT 109 

human nature of ours, isn't it? But how 
infinitely beguiling! 

So I sat down beside Mr. Starkweather on 
the log and crossed my legs. I felt as though 
I had set foot in a new country. 

''Would you really advise me," I asked, 
"to start in to be a millionnaire ? " 

He chuckled: 

''Well, that 's one way of putting it. Hitch 
your wagon to a star; but begin by making 
a few dollars more a year than you spend. 

When I began "he stopped short with 

an amused smile, remembering that I did not 
know who he was. 

"Of course," I said, "I understand that." 

"A man must begin small" — he was on 
pleasant ground — "and anywhere he likes, 
a few dollars here, a few there. He must 
work hard, he must save, he must be both 
bold and cautious. I know a man who began 
when he was about your age with total assets 
of ten dollars and a good digestion. He 's 
now considered a fairly wealthy man. He 
has a home in the city, a place in the country, 
and he goes to Europe when he likes. He 
has so arranged his affairs that young men do 
most of the work and he draws the dividends 



ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 



III 



— and all in a little more than twenty years. 
I made every single cent — but as I said, it's 
a penny business to start with. The point is, 
I like to see young men ambitious." 

*' Ambitious," I asked, ''for what?" 

** Why, to rise in the world; to get ahead." 

*'I know you'll pardon me," I said, ''for 
appearing to cross-examine you, but I 'm 
tremendously interested in these things. What 
do you mean by rising? And who am I to 
get ahead of?" 

He looked at me in astonishment, and 
with evident impatience at my consummate 
stupidity. 

"I am serious," I said. "I really want to 
make the best I can of my life. It 's the only 
one I Vegot." 

"See here," he said: "let us say you clear 
up five hundred a year from this farm " 

"You exaggerate — " I interrupted. 

"Do I?" he laughed; "that makes my 
case all the better. Now, is n't it possible to 
rise from that ? Could n't you make a thou- 
sand or five thousand or even fifty thousand 
a year?" 

It seems an unanswerable argument: fifty 
thousand dollars! 



112 ADVENTURES IN 

"I suppose I might," I said, "but do you 
think I 'd be any better off or happier with 
fifty thousand a year than I am now? You 
see, I Hke all these surroundings better than 
any other place I ever knew. That old green 
hill over there with the oak on it is an intimate 
friend of mine. I have a good cornfield in 
which every year I work miracles. I 've a 
cow and a horse, and a few pigs. I have a 
comfortable home. My appetite is perfect, 
and I have plenty of food to gratify it. I 
sleep every night like a boy, for I have n't a 
trouble in this world to disturb me. I enjoy 
the mornings here in the country: and the 
evenings are pleasant. Some of my neigh- 
bours have come to be my good friends. I 
like them and I am pretty sure they like me. 
Inside the house there I have the best books 
ever written and I have time in the evenings 
to read them — I mean really read them. Now 
the question is, would I be any better off, or 
any happier, if I had fifty thousand a year?" 

John Starkweather laughed. 

"Well, sir," he said, "I see I 've made the 
acquaintance of a philosopher." 

"Let us say," I continued, "that you are 
willing to invest twenty years of your life in a 



CONTENTMENT 



II 



million dollars." (''Merely an illustra+*on," 
said John Starkweather.) "You Kave it 
where you can put it in the bank ^xid take it 
out again, or you can give it fo/m in houses, 
yachts, and other things. Now twenty years 
of my life — to me — is worth more than a 
million dollars. I simply can't afford to sell 
if for that. I prefer to invest it, as somebody 
or. other has said, unearned in life. I 've 
always had a liking for intangible properties." 

''See here," said John Starkweather, "you 
are taking a narrow view of life. You are 
making your own pleasure the only standard. 
Should n't a man make the most of the talents 
given him? Has n't he a duty to society?" 

"Now you are shifting your ground," I 
said, "from the question of personal satisfac- 
tion to that of duty. That concerns me, too. 
Let me ask you : Is n't it important to society 
that this piece of earth be plowed and cul- 
tivated?" 

"Yes, but " 

" Isn 't it honest and useful work?" 

"Of course." 

"Isn't it important that it shall not only 
be done, but well done?" 

"Certainly." 



IT4 ADVENTURES IN 

*'lt takes all there is In a good man," I 
said, "to be a good farmer.' 

''But the point is," he argued, ''might not 
the same faculties applied to other things 
yield better and bigger results?" 

"That is a problem, of course," I said. "I 
tried money-making once — in a city — and 
I was unsuccessful and unhappy; here I am 
both successful and happy. I suppose I was 
one of the young men who did the work while 
some millionnaire drew the dividends." (I 
was cutting close, and I did n't venture to 
look at him). "No doubt he had his houses 
and yachts and went to Europe when he liked. 
I know I lived upstairs — back — where 
there was n't a tree to be seen, or a spear of 
green grass, or a hill, or a brook: only smoke 
and chimneys and littered roofs. Lord be 
thanked for my escape! Sometimes I think 
that Success has formed a silent conspiracy 
against Youth. Success holds up a single 
glittering apple and bids Youth strip and run 
for it ; and Youth runs and Success still holds 
the apple." 

John Starkweather said nothing. 

"Yes," I said, "there are duties. We 
realise, we farmers, that we must produce 



CONTENTMENT 115 

more than we ourselves can eat or wear or 
burn. We realise that we are the foundation : 
we connect human life with the earth. We 
dig and plant and produce, and having eaten 
at the first table ourselves, we pass what is 
left to the bankers and millionnaires. Did you 
ever think, stranger, that most of the wars of 
the world have been fought for the control of 
this farmer's second table? Have you 
thought that the surplus of wheat and corn 
and cotton is what the railroads are struggling 
to carry? Upon our surplus run all the fac- 
tories and mills; a little of it gathered in 
cash makes a millionnaire. But we farmers, 
we sit back comfortably after dinner, and 
joke with our wives and play with our babies, 
and let all the rest of you -^ght for the crumbs 
that fall from our abundant tables. If once 
we really cared and got up and shook our- 
selves, and said to the maid: 'Here, child, 
don't waste the crusts: gather 'em up and 
to-morrow we '11 have a cottage pudding,' 
where in the world would all the millionnaires 
be?" 

Oh, I tell you, I waxed eloquent. I 
could n't let John Starkweather, or any other 
man, get away with the conviction that a 



ii6 ADVENTURES IN 

millionnaire is better than a farmer. ''More- 
over," I said, ''think of the position of the 
miUionnaire. He spends his time playing not 
with hfe, but with the symbols of life, whether 
cash or houses. Any day the symbols may 
change; a little war may happen along, there 
may be a defective flue or a western breeze, 
or even a panic because the farmers are n't 
scattering as many crumbs as usual (they 
call it crop failure, but I 've noticed that 
the farmers still continue to have plenty to 
eat) and then what happens to your million- 
naire? Not knowing how to produce any- 
thing himself, he w^ould starve to death if 
there were not always, somewhere, a farmer 
to take him up to the table." 

"You're making a strong case," laughed 
John Starkweather. 

"Strong!" I said. "It is simply wonder- 
ful what a leverage upon society a few acres 
of land, a cow, a pig or two, and a span of 
horses gives a man. I 'm ridiculously in- 
dependent. I 'd be the hardest sort of a man 
to dislodge or crush. I tell you, my friend, 
a farmer is like an oak, his roots strike deep 
in the soil, he draws a sufficiency of food from 
the earth itself, he breathes the free air around 



CONTENTMENT 117 

him, his thirst is quenched by heaven itself — 
and there 's no tax on sunshine." 

I paused for very lack of breath. John 
Starkw^eather was laughing. 

''When you commiserate me, therefore" 
("I 'm sure I shall never do it again," said 
John Starkweather) — " when you commiserate 
me, therefore, and advise me to rise, you must 
give me really good reasons for changing my 
occupation and becoming a millionnaire. You 
must prove to me that I can be more indepen- 
dent, more honest, moreuseful as a millionnaire, 
and that I shall have better and truer friends ! ' ' 

John Starkweather looked around at me 
(I knew I had been absurdly eager and I was 
rather ashamed of myself) and put his hand 
on mxy knee (he has a wonderfully fine eye 1) . 

"I don't believe," he said, "you'd have 
any truer friends." 

"Anyway," I said repentantly, "I '11 admit 
thatmillionnaires have their place — at present 
I would n't do entirely away with them, 
though I do think they 'd enjoy farming bet- 
ter. And if I were to select a millionnaire for 
all the best things I know, I should certainly 
choose you, Mr. Starkweather." 

He jumped up. 



II 



8 ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 



"You know who I am?" he asked. 

I nodded. 

*'And you knew all the time?" 
. I nodded. 

''Well, you 're a good one! " 

We both laughed and fell to talking with 
the greatest friendliness. I led him down my 
garden to show him my prize pie-plant, of 
which I am enormously proud, and I pulled 
for him some of the finest stalks I could find. 

**Take it home," I said, ''it makes the best 
pies of any pie-plant in this country." 

He took it under his arm. 

"I want you to come over and see me the 
first chance you get," he said. "I 'm going 
to prove to you by physical demonstration 
that it 's better sport to be a millionnaire than 
a farmer — not that I am a millionnaire: I 'm 
only accepting the reputation you give me." 

So I walked with him down to the lane. 

"Let me know when you grease up again/' 
he said, "and I '11 come over." 

So we shook hands: and he set off sturdily 
down the road with the pie-plant leaves 
waving cheerfully over his shoulder. 




" Somehow, and suddenly, I was a boy again" 

VIII 
A BOY AND A PREACHER 

THIS morning I went to church with Har- 
riet. I usually have some excuse for 
not going, but this morning I had them out 
one by one and they were altogether so shabby 
that I decided not to use them. So I put on 
my stiff shirt and Harriet came out in her 
best black cape with the silk fringes. She 
looked so immaculate, so ruddy, so cheer- 
fully sober (for Sunday) that I was recon- 
ciled to the idea of driving her up to the 
church. And I am glad I went, for the ex- 
perience I had. 

119 



I20 ADVENTURES IN 

It was an ideal summer Sunday: sunshiny, 
clear and still. I believe if I had been some 
Rip Van Winkle waking after twenty years' 
sleep I should have known it for Sunday. 
Away off over the hill somewhere we could 
hear a lazy farm boy singing at the top of his 
voice: the higher cadences of his song reached 
us pleasantly through the still air. The hens 
sitting near the lane fence, fluffing the dust 
over their backs, were holding a small and 
talkative service of their own. As we turned 
into the main road we saw the Patterson 
children on their way to church, all the little 
girls in Sunday ribbons, and all the little boys 
very uncomfortable in knit stockings. 

' ' It seems a pity to go to church on a day 
like this," I said to Harriet. 

''A pity!" she exclaimed. ''Could any- 
thing be more appropriate?" 

Harriet is good because she can't help it. 
Poor woman! — but I haven't any pity for 
her. 

It sometimes seems to me the more worship- 
ful I feel the less I want to go to church. I 
don't know why it is, but these forms, simple 
though they are, trouble me. The moment 
an emotion, especially a religious emotion, 



CONTENTMENT 121 

becomes an institution, it somehow loses life. 
True emotion is rare and costly and that 
which is awakened from without never rises 
to the height of that which springs sponta- 
neously from within. 

Back of the church stands a long low shed 
where we tied our horse. A number of other 
buggies were already there, several women 
were standing in groups, preening their 
feathers, a neighbour of ours who has a 
tremendous bass voice was talking to a friend: 

'' Yas, oats is showing up well, but wheat is 
backward." 

His voice, which he was evidently trying 
to subdue for Sunday, boomed through the 
still air. So we walked among the trees to 
the door of the church. A smiling elder, in 
an unaccustomed long coat, bowed and 
greeted us. As we went in there was an odour 
of cushions and our footsteps on the wooden 
floor echoed in the warm emptiness of the 
church. The Scotch preacher was finding his 
place in the big Bible; he stood solid and 
shaggy behind the yellow oak pulpit, a pecu- 
liar professional look on his face. In the pul- 
pit the Scotch preacher it too much minister, 
too little man. He is best down among us 



122 ADVENTURES IN 

with his hand in ours. He is a sort of human 
solvent. Is there a twisted and hardened 
heart in the community he beams upon it 
from his cheerful eye, he speaks out of his 
great charity, he gives the friendly pressure 
of his large hand, and that hardened heart 
dissolves and its frozen hopelessness loses 
itself in tears. So he goes through life, seem- 
ing always to understand. He is not sur- 
prised by wickedness nor discouraged by 
weakness: he is so sure of a greater Strength! 

But I must come to my experience, which 
I am almost tempted to call a resurrection — 
the resurrection of a boy, long since gone 
away, and of a tall lank preacher who. in his 
humility, looked upon himself as a failure. 
I hardly know how it all came back to me; 
possibly it was the scent-laden breeze that 
came in from the woods through the half- 
open church window, perhaps it was a line in 
one of the old songs, perhaps it was the dron- 
ing voice of the Scotch preacher — some- 
how, and suddenly, I was a boy again. 

^To this day I think of death as a valley: 

a dark shadowy valley: the Valley of the 
Shadow of Death. So persistent are the 
impressions of boyhood! As I sat in the 



CONTENTMENT 123 

church I could see, as distinctly as though 1 
were there, the church of my boyhood and 
the tall dyspeptic preacher looming above 
the pulpit, the peculiar way the light came 
through the coarse colour of the windows, the 
barrenness and stiffness of the great empty 
room, the raw girders overhead, the prim 
choir. There was something in that preacher, 
gaunt, worn, sodden though he appeared: 
a spark somewhere, a little flame, mostly 
smothered by the gray dreariness of his sur- 
roundings, and yet blazing up at times to 
some warmth. 

As I remember it, our church was a church 
of failures. They sent us the old gray 
preachers worn out in other fields. Such a 
succession of them I remember, each with some 
peculiarity, some pathos. They were of the 
old sort, indoctrinated Presbyterians, and 
they harrowed well our barren field with the 
tooth of their hard creed. Some thundered 
the Law, some pleaded Love; but of all of 
them I remember best the one who thought 
himself the greatest failure. I think he had 
tried a hundred churches — a hard life, poorly 
paid, unappreciated — in a new country. He 
had once had a family, but one by one they 



124 ADVENTURES IN 

had died. No two were buried in the same 
cemetery; and finally, before he came to our 
village, his wife, too, had gone. And he was 
old, and out of health, and discouraged: seek- 
ing some final warmth from his own cold 
doctrine. How I see him, a trifle bent, in his 
long worn coat, walking in the country roads: 
not knowing of a boy who loved him! 

He told my father once: I recall his exact 
words: 

*' My days have been long, and I have failed. 
It was not given me to reach men's hearts." 

Oh gray preacher, may I now make 
amends ? Will you forgive me ? I was a boy 
and did not know; a boy whose emotions 
were hidden under mountains of reserve: 
who could have stood up to be shot more 
easily than he could have said: ''I love you! " 

Of that preacher's sermons I remember not 
one word, though I must have heard scores 
of them — only that they were interminably 
long and dull and that my legs grew weary of 
sitting and that I was often hungry. It was 
no doubt the dreadful old doctrine that he 
preached, thundering the horrors of disobe- 
dience, urging an impossible love through fear 
and a vain belief without reason. All that 



CONTENTMENT 125 

touched me not at all, save with a sort of won- 
der at the working of his great Adam's apple 
and the strange rollings of his cavernous eyes. 
This he looked upon as the work of God; thus 
for years he had sought, with self-confessed 
failure, to touch the souls of his people. How 
we travel in darkness and the work we do in 
all seriousness counts for naught, and the thing 
we toss ofE in play- time, unconsciously, God 
uses! 

One tow-headed boy sitting there in a front 
row dreaming dreams, if the sermons touched 
him not, was yet thrilled to the depths of his 
being by that tall preacher. Somewhere, 
I said, he had a spark within him. I think 
he never knew it: or if he knew it, he regarded 
it as a wayward impulse that might lead him 
from his God. It was a spark of poetry: 
strange flower in such a husk. In times of 
emotion it bloomed, but in daily life it emitted 
no fragrance. I have wondered what might 
have been if some one — some understanding 
woman — had recognised his gift, or if he 
himself as a boy had once dared to cut free! 
We do not know: we do not know the tragedy 
of our nearest friend ! 

By some instinct the preacher chose his 



126 ADVENTURES IN 

readings mostly from the Old Testament — 
those splendid, marching passages, full of 
oriental imagery. As he read there would 
creep into his voice a certain resonance that 
lifted him and his calling suddenly above his 
gray surroundings. 

How vividly I recall his reading of the 
twenty-third Psalm — a particular reading. I 
suppose I had heard the passage many times 
before, but upon this certain morning 

Shall I ever forget? The windows were 
open, for it was May, and a boy could look 
out on the hillside and see with longing eyes 
the inviting grass and trees. A soft wind 
blew in across the church ; it was full of the 
very essence of spring. I smell it yet. On 
the pulpit stood a bunch of crocuses crowded 
into a vase: some Mary's offering. An old 
man named Johnson who sat near us was 
already beginning to breathe heavily, prepar- 
atory to sinking into his regular Sunday 
snore. Then those words from the preacher, 
bringing me suddenly — how shall I express 
it? — out of some formless void, to intense 
consciousness — a miracle of creation: 

"Yea though I walk through the valley of 
the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for 



/ 



CONTENTMENT 127 

thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they 
comfort me." 

Well, I saw the way to the place of death 
that morning; far more vividly I saw it than 
any natural scene I know: and myself walkmg 
therein. I shall know it again when I come 
to pass that way; the tall, dark, rocky cliffs, 
the shadowy path within, the overhanging 
dark branches, even the whitened dead bones 
by the way — and as one of the vivid phan- 
tasms of boyhood — cloaked figures I saw, 
lurking mysteriously in deep recesses, fear- 
some for their very silence. And yet I with 
magic rod and staff walking within — boldly, 
fearing no evil, full of faith, hope, courage, 
love, invoking images of terror but for the 
joy of braving them. Ah, tow-headed boy, 
shall I tread as lightly that dread pathway 
when I come to it? Shall I, like you, fear 
no evil! 

So that great morning went away. I 
heard nothing of singing or sermon and came 
not to myself until my mother, touching 
my arm, asked me if I had been asleep ! And 
I smiled and thought how little grown people 
knew — and I looked up at the sad sick face 
of the old preacher with a new interest and 



128 ADVENTURES IN 

friendliness. I felt, somehow, that he too 
was a familiar of my secret valley. I should 
have liked to ask him, but I did not dare. 
So I followed my mother when she went to 
speak to him, and when he did not see, I 
touched his coat. 

After that how I watched when he came 
to the reading. And one great Sunday, he 
chose a chapter from Ecclesiastes, the one 
that begins sonorously: 

"Remember now thy creator in the days of thy 
youth." 

Surely that gaunt preacher had the true 
fire in his gray soul. How his voice dwelt 
and quivered and softened upon the words! 

" While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the 
stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after 
the rain " 

Thus he brought in the universe to that 
small church and filled the heart of a boy. 

** In the days when the keepers of the house shall 
tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, 
and the grinders cease because they are few, and 
those that look out of the windows be darkened. 

"And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when 
the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up 



CONTENTMENT 129 

at the voice of the bird and all the daughters of 
music shall be brought low." , 

Do not think that I understood the mean- 
ing of those passages: I am not vain enough 
to think I know even now — but the sound 
of them, the roll of them, the beautiful words, 
and above all, the pictures ! 

Those Daughters of Music, how I lived 
for days imagining them! They were of 
the trees and the hills, and they were very 
beautiful but elusive; one saw them as he 
heard singing afar off, sweet strains fading 
often into silences. Daughters of Music! 
Daughters of Music! And why should they 
be brought low? 

Doors shut in the streets — how I saw 
them — a long, long street, silent, full of 
sunshine, and the doors shut, and no sound 
anywhere but the low sound of the grinding: 
and the mill with the wheels drowsily turn- 
ing and no one there at all save one boy 
with fluttering heart, tiptoeing in the sunlit 
doorway. 

And the voice of the bird. Not the song 
but the voice. Yes, a bird had a voice. I 
had known it always, and yet somehow 
I had not dared to say it. I felt that they 



I30 ADVENTURES IN 

would look at me with that questioning, 
incredulous look which I dreaded beyond 
belief. They might laugh! But here it was 
in the Book — the voice of a bird. How 
my appreciation of that Book increased 
and what a new confidence it gave me in my 
own images ! I went about for days, listening, 
listening, listening — and interpreting. 

So the words of the preacher and the fire 
in them : 

"And when they shall be afraid of that which is 
high and fears shall be in the way " 

I knew the fear of that which is high: I 
had dreamed of it commonly. And I knew 
also the Fear that stood in the way: him I 
had seen in a myriad of forms, looming 
black by darkness in every lane I trod; and 
yet with what defiance I met and slew him ! 

And then, more thrilling than all else, the 
words of the preacher: 

" Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden 
bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the foun- 
tain, or the wheel broken at the cistern." 

Such pictures: that silver cord, that golden 
bowl! And why and wherefore? 



CONTENTMENT 131 

A thousand ways I turned them in my 
mind — and always with the sound of the 
preacher's voice in my ears — the resonance 
of the words conveying an indescribable fire 
of inspiration. Vaguely and yet with cer- 
tainty I knew the preacher spoke out cf 
some unfathomable emotion which I did 
not understand — which I did not care to 
understand. Since then I have thought what 
those words must have meant to him ! 

Ah, that tall lank preacher, who thought 
himself a failure: how long I shall remember 
him and the words he read and the mourn- 
ful yet resonant cadences of his voice — and 
the barren church, and the stony religion! 
Heaven he gave me, unknowing, while he 
preached an ineffectual hell. 

As we rode home Harriet looked into my 
face. 

• ''You have enjoyed the service," she said 
softly. 

"Yes," I said. 

*' It was a good sermon," she said. 

"Was it?" I replied. 




"** r#<A«.-ry. 



IX 



THE TRAMP 



I HAVE had a new and strange experi- 
ence — droll in one way, grotesque in 
another and when everything is said, tragic: 
at least an adventure. Harriet looks at me 
accusingly, and I have had to preserve the 
air of one deeply contrite now for two days 
(no easy accomplishment for me!), even 
though in secret I have smiled and pondered. 

How our life has been warped by books! 
We are not contented with realities: we 
crave conclusions. With what ardour our 

132 



ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 133 

minds respond to real events with literary 
deductions. Upon a train of incidents, as 
unconnected as life itself, we are wont to 
clap a booky ending. An instinctive desire 
for completeness animates the human mind 
(a struggle to circumscribe the infinite). 
We would like to have life "turn out" — but 
it does n't — it does n't. Each event is the 
beginning of a whole new genealogy of events. 
In boyhood I remember asking after every 
story I heard: "What happened next?" for 
no conclusion ever quite satisfied me — even 
when the hero died in his own gore. I always 
knew there was something yet remaining 
to be told. The only sure conclusion we can 
reach is this: Life changes. And what is 
more enthralling to the human mind than 
this splendid, boundless, coloured mutability! 
— life in the making? How strange it is, 
then, that we should be contented to take 
such small parts of it as we can grasp, and to 
say, "This is the true explanation." By 
such devices we seek to bring infinite existence 
within our finite egoistic grasp. We solidify 
and define where solidification means loss of 
interest; and loss of interest, not years, is 
old age. 



134 ADVENTURES IN 

So I have mused since my tramp came 
in for a moment out of the Mystery (as we 
all do) and went away again into the Mys- 
tery (in our way, too) . 

There are strange things in this world ! 

As I came around the corner I saw sitting 
there on my steps the very personification 
of Ruin, a tumble-down, dilapidated wreck 
of manhood. He gave one the impression 
of having been dropped where he sat, all 
in a heap. My first instinctive feeling was 
not one of recoil or even of hostility, but 
rather a sudden desire to pick him up and 
put him where he belonged, the instinct, I 
should say, of the normal man who hangs 
his axe always on the same nail. When he 
saw me he gathered himself together with 
reluctance and stood fully revealed. It was 
a curious attitude of mingled effrontery and 
apology. ''Hit me if you dare," blustered 
his outward personality. ''For God's sake, 
don't hit me," cried the innate fear in his 
eyes. I stopped and looked at him sharply. 
His eyes dropped, his look slid away, so that 
I experienced a sense of shame, as though I 
had trampled upon him. A damp rag of 



CONTENTMENT 135 

humanity! I confess that my first impulse, 
and a strong one, was to kick him for the 
good of the human race. No man has a 
right to be Hke that. 

And then, quite suddenly, I had a great 
revulsion of feeling. What was I that I 
should judge without knowledge? Perhaps, 
after all, here was one bearing treasure. So 
I said: 

*' You are the man I have been expecting." 

He did not reply, only flashed his eyes up 
at me, wherein fear deepened. 

''I have been saving up a coat for you," I 
said, ''and a pair of shoes. They are not 
much worn," I said, ''but a little too small 
for me. I think they will fit you." 

He looked at me again, not sharply, but 
with a sort of weak cunning. So far he had 
not said a word. 

"I think our supper is nearly ready," I 
said: "let us go in." 

"No, mister," he mumbled, "a bite out 
here — no, mister" — and then, as though 
the sound of his own voice inspired him, he 
grew declamatory. 

" I 'm a respectable man, mister, plumber 
by trade, but " 



136 ADVENTURES IN 

*'But," I interrupted, ''you can't get any 
work, you 're cold and you have n't had any- 
thing to eat for two days, so you are walking 
out here in the country where we farmers 
have no plumbing to do. At home you have 
a starving wife and three small children—" 

''Six, mister -" 

"Well, six — And now we will go in to 
supper." 

I led him into the entry way and poured 
for him a big basin of hot water. As I stepped 
out again with a comb he was slinking toward 
the doorway. 

"Here," I said, "is a comb; we are having 
supper now in a few minutes." 

I wish I could picture Harriet's face when 
I brought him into her immaculate kitchen. 
But I gave her a look, one of the command- 
ing sort that I can put on in times of great 
emergency, and she silently laid another 
place at the table. 

When I came to look at our Ruin by the 
full lamplight I was surprised to see what a 
change a little warm water and a comb had 
wrought in him. He came to the table un- 
certain, blinking, apologetic. His forehead, 
I saw, was really impressive — high, narrow 



CONTENTMENT 137 

and thin-skinned. His face gave one some- 
how the impression of a carving once full of 
significant lines, now blurred and worn, as 
though Time, having first marked it with the 
lines of character, had grown discouraged 
and brushed the hand of forgetfulness over 
her work. He had peculiar thin, silky hair 
of no particular colour, with a certain almost 
childish pathetic waviness around the ears 
and at the back of the neck. Something, 
after all, about the man aroused one's com- 
passion. 

I don't know that he looked dissipated, 
and surely he was not as dirty as I had at 
first supposed. Something remained that 
suggested a care for himself in the past. It 
was not dissipation, I decided; it was rather 
an indefinable looseness and weakness, that 
gave one alternately the feeling I had first ex- 
perienced, that of anger, succeeded by the 
compassion that one feels for a child. To 
Harriet, when she had once seen him, he was 
all child, and she all compassion. 

We disturbed him with no questions 
Harriet's fundamental quality is homeliness, 
comfortableness. Her tea-kettle seems al- 
ways singing; an indefinable tabbiness, as 



138 ADVENTURES IN 

of feather cushions, kirks in her dining-room, 
a right warmth of table and chairs, inde- 
scribably comfortable at the end of a chilly 
day. A busy good-smelling steam arises 
from all her dishes at once, and the light in 
the middle of the table is of a redness that 
enthralls the human soul. As for Harriet 
herself, she is the personification of comfort, 
airy, clean, warm, inexpressibly wholesome. 
And never in the world is she so engaging as 
when she ministers to a man's hunger. Truth- 
fully, sometimes, when she comes to me out 
of the dimmer light of the kitchen to the ra- 
diance of the table with a plate of muffins, 
it is as though she and the muffins were a 
part of each other, and that she is really 
offering some of herself. And down in my 
heart I know she is doing just that! 

Well, it was wonderful to see our Ruin 
expand in the warmth of Harriet's presence. 
He had been doubtful of me; of Harriet, I 
could see, he was absolutely sure. And 
how he did eat, saying nothing at all, while 
Harriet plied him with food and talked to 
me of the most disarming commonplaces. I 
think it did her heart good to see the way he 
ate: as though he had had nothing before 



CONTENTMENT 139 

in days. As he buttered his muffin, not with- 
out some refinement, I could see that his 
hand was long, a curious, lean, ineffectual 
hand, with a curving little finger. With the 
drinking of the hot coffee colour began to 
steal up into his face, and when Harriet 
brought out a quarter of pie saved over from 
our dinner and placed it before him — a fine 
brown pie with small hieroglyphics in the 
top from whence rose sugary bubbles — he 
seemed almost to escape himself. And 
Harriet fairly purred with hospitality. 

The more he ate the more of a man he 
became. His manners improved, his back 
straightened up, he acquired a not unimpres- 
sive poise of the head. Such is the miraculous 
power of hot muffins and pie! 

''As you came down," I asked finally, 
**did you happen to see old man Master- 
son's threshing machine?" 

''A big red one, with a yellow blow-off?" 

''That's the one," I said. 

"Well, it was just turning into a field 
about two miles above here," he replied. 

" Big gray, banked bam? " I asked. 

"Yes, and a little unpainted house," said 
our friend. 



140 ADVENTURES IN 

''That's Parsons'," put in Harriet, with a 
mellow laugh. ''I wonder if he ever will 
paint that house. He builds bigger bams 
every year and does n't touch the house. 
Poor Mrs. Parsons " 

And so we talked of barns and threshing 
machines in the way we farmers love to do and 
I lured our friend slowly into talking about 
himself. At first he was non-committal enough 
and what he said seemed curiously made to 
order; he used certain set phrases with which 
to explain simply what was not easy to ex- 
plain — a device not uncommon to all of us. 
I was fearful of not getting within this 
outward armouring, but gradually as we talked 
and Harriet poured him a third cup of hot 
coffee he dropped into a more familiar 
tone. He told with some sprightliness of 
having seen threshings in Mexico, how the 
grain was beaten out with flails in the patios, 
and afterwards thrown up in the wind to 
winnow out. 

' ' You must have seen a good deal of life, ' ' 
remarked Harriet sympathetically. 

At this remark I saw one of our Ruin's 
long hands draw up and clinch. He turned 
his head toward Harriet. His face was 



CONTENTMENT 141 

partly in the shadow, but there was some- 
thing striking and strange in the way he 
looked at her, and a deepness in his voice 
when he spoke: 

''Too much! I 've seen too much of hfe.'* 
He threw out one arm and brought it back 
with a shudder. 

''You see what it has left me," he said. 
"I am an example of too much life." 

In response to Harriet's melting com- 
passion he had spoken with unfathomable 
bitterness. Suddenly he leaned forward to- 
ward me with a piercing gaze as though he 
would look into my soul. His face had 
changed completely; from the loose and va- 
cant mask of the early evening it had taken 
on the utmost tensity of emotion. 

"You do not know," he said, "what it is 
to live too much — and to be afraid." 

"Live too much?" I asked. 

"Yes, live too much, that is what I do — 
and I am afraid." 

He paused a moment and then broke out 
in a higher key: 

"You think I am a tramp. Yes — yoti 
do. I know — a worthless fellow, lying, 
begging, stealing when he can't beg. You 



142 ADVENTURES IN 

have taken me in and fed me. You have 
said the first kind words I have heard, it 
seems to me, in years. I don't know who 
you are. I shall never see you again." 

I cannot well describe the intensity of the 
passion with which he spoke, his face shaking 
with emotion, his hands trembling. 

''Oh, yes," I said easily, ''we are com- 
fqrtable people here — and it is a good place 
to live." 

"No, no," he returned. "I know, I Ve 
got my call — " Then leaning forward he 
said in a lower, even more intense voice — 
"I live everything beforehand." 

I was startled by the look of his eyes: the 
abject terror of it: and I thought to myself, 
"The man is not right in his mind." And 
yet I longed to know of the life within this 
strange husk of manhood. 

"I know," he said, as if reading my thought, 
"you think" — and he tapped his forehead 
with one finger — "but I'm not. I'm as 
sane as you are." 

It was a strange story he told. It seems 
almost unbelievable to me as I set it down 
here, until I reflect how little any one of us 
knows of the deep life within his nearest 



CONTENTMENT 143 

neighbour — what stories there are, what 
tragedies enacted under a calm exterior! 
What a drama there may be in this common- 
place man buying ten pounds of sugar at the 
grocery store, or this other one driving his 
two old horses in the town road! We do 
not know. And how rarely are the men of 
inner adventure articulate! Therefore I treas- 
ure the curious story the tramp told me. I 
do not question its truth. It came as all 
truth does, through a clouded and unclean 
medium: and any judgment of the story 
itself must be based upon a knowledge of the 
personal equation of the Ruin who told it. 

''I am no tramp," he said, ''in reality, I 
am no tramp. I began as well as anyone — 
It does n't matter now, only I won't have 
any of the sympathy that people give to 
the man who has seen better days. I hate 
sentiment. / hate it " 

I cannot attempt to set down the story in 
his own words. It was broken with ex- 
clamations and involved with wandering 
sophistries and diatribes of self -blame. His 
mind had trampled upon itself in throes of 
introspection rmtil it was often difficult to 
say which way the paths of the narrative 



144 ADVENTURES IN 

really led. He had thought so much and 
acted so little that he travelled in a veritable 
bog of indecision. And yet, withal, some 
ideas, by constant attrition, had acquired a 
really striking form. ''I am afraid before 
life," he said. "It makes me dizzy with 
thought." 

At another time he said, ' ' If I am a tramp 
at all, I am a mental tramp. I have an 
unanchored mind." 

It seems that he came to a realisation that 
there was something peculiar about him at 
a very early age. He said they would look 
at him and whisper to one another and that 
his sayings were much repeated, often in his 
hearing. He knew that he was considered an 
extraordinary child: they baited him with 
questions that they might laugh at his 
quaint replies. He said that as early as he 
could remember he used to plan situations 
so that he might say things that were strange 
and even shocking in a child. His father 
was a small professor in a small college — a 
''worm" he called him bitterly — ''one of 
those worms that bores in books and finally 
dries up and blows off." But his mother — 
he said she was an angel. I recall his exact 



CONTENTMENT 145 

expression about her eyes that ''when she 
looked at one it made him better." He 
spoke of her with a softening of the voice, 
looking often at Harriet. He talked a good 
deal about his mother, trying to account for 
himself through her. She was not strong, 
he said, and very sensitive to the contact of 
either friends or enemies — evidently a ner- 
vous, high-strung woman. 

''You have known such people," he said; 
"everything hurt her." 

He said she "starved to death." She 
starved for affection and understanding. 

One of the first things he recalled of his boy- 
hood was his passionate love for his mother. 

"I can remember," he said, "lying awake 
in my bed and thinking how I would love 
her and serve her — and I could see mvself 
in all sorts of impossible places saving her 
from danger. When she came to my room 
to bid me good night, I imagined how I should 
look — for I have always been able to see 
myself doing things — when I threw my arms 
around her neck to kiss her." 

Here he reached a strange part of his story. 
I had been watching Harriet out of the corner 
of my eye. At first her face was tearful with 



146 ADVENTURES IN 

compassion, but as the Ruin proceeded it 
became a study in wonder and finally in out- 
right alarm. He said that when his mother 
came in to bid him good night he saw himself 
so plainly beforehand (''more vividly than I 
see you at this moment") and felt his emotion 
so keenly that when his mother actually 
stooped to kiss him, somehow he could not 
respond. He could not throw his arms 
around her neck. He said he often lay quiet, 
in waiting, trembling all over until she had 
gone, not only suffering himself but pitying 
her, because he understood how she must 
feel. Then he would follow her, he said, in 
imagination through the long hall, seeing him- 
self stealing behind her, just touching her 
hand, wistfully hoping that she might turn to 
him again — and yet fearing. He said no 
one knew the agonies he suffered at seeing his 
mother's disappointment over his apparent 
coldness and unresponsiveness. 

" I think," he said, *' it hastened her death." 
He would not go to the funeral; he did not 
dare, he said. He cried and fought when 
they came to take him aw^ay, and when the 
house was silent he ran up to her room and 
buried his head in her pillows and ran in swift 



CONTENTMENT 147 

imagination to her funeral. He said he 
could see himself in the country road, hurry- 
ing in the cold rain — for it seemed raining 

— he said he could actually feel the stones 
and ruts, although he could not tell how it was 
possible that he should have seen himself at a 
distance and felt in his own feet the stones of 
the road. He said he saw the box taken from 
the wagon — saw it — and that he heard the 
sound of the clods thrown in, and it made him 
shriek until they came running and held him. 

As he grew older he said he came to live 
everything beforehand, and that the event 
as imagined was so far more vivid and affect- 
ing that he had no heart for the reality itself. 

'' It seems strange to you, ' ' he said, ' 'but I am 
telling you exactly what my experience was." 

It was curious, he said, when his father 
told him he must not do a thing, how he went 
on and imagined in how many different ways 
he could do it — and how, afterward, he 
imagined he was punished by that ''worm," 
his father, whom he seemed to hate bitterly. 
Of those early days, in which he suffered 
acutely — in idleness, apparently — and per- 
haps that was one of the causes of his disorder 

— he told us at length, but many of the 



148 ADVENTURES IN 

incidents were so evidently worn by the 
constant handling of his mind that they 
gave no clear impression. 

Finally, he ran away from home, he said. 
At first he found that a wholly new place and 
new people took him out of himself (''sur- 
prised me," he said, *'so that I could not live 
everything beforehand "). Thus he fled. The 
slang he used, ''chased himself all over the 
country," seemed peculiarly expressive. He 
had been in foreign countries; he had herded 
sheep in Australia (so he said), and certainly 
from his knowledge of the country he had 
wandered with the gamboleros of South 
America; he had gone for gold to Alaska, 
and worked in the lumber camps of the 
Pacific Northwest. But he could not escape, 
he said. In a short time he was no longer 
"surprised." His account of his travels, 
while fragmentary, had a peculiar vividness. 
He saw what he described, and he saw it so 
plainly that his mind ran off into curious 
details that made his words strike some- 
times like flashes of lightning. A strange and 
wonderful mind — uncontrolled. How that 
man needed the discipline of common work! 

I have rarely listened to a story with such 



CONTENTMENT 149 

rapt interest. It was not only what he said, 
nor how he said it, but how he let me see the 
strange workings of his mind. It was con- 
tinuously a story of a story. When his voice 
finally died down I drew a long breath and 
was astonished to perceive that it was nearly 
midnight — and Harriet speechless with her 
emotions. For a moment he sat quiet and 
then burst out: 

*'I cannot get away: I cannot escape," 
and the veritable look of some trapped crea- 
ture came into his eyes, fear so abject that I 
reached over and laid my hand on his arm: 

*' Friend," I said, "stop here. We have a 
good country. You have travelled far enough. 
I know from experience what a cornfield will 
do for a man." 

'' I have lived all sorts of life," he continued 
as if he had not heard a word I said, ''and I 
have lived it all twice, and I am afraid." 

''Face it," I said, gripping his arm, longing 
for some power to " blow grit into him." 

"Face it!" he exclaimed, "don't you sup- 
pose I have tried. If I could do a thing — 
anything — a few times without thinking — 
once would be enough — I might be all right. 
I should be all right." 



ISO ADVENTURES IN 

He brought his fist down on the table, and 
there was a note of resolution in his voice. 
I moved my chair nearer to him, feeling as 
though I were saving an immortal soul from 
destruction. I told him of our life, how the 
quiet and the work of it would solve his prob- 
lems. I sketched with enthusiasm my own 
experience and I planned swiftly how he could 
live, absorbed in simple work — and in books. 

''Try it," I said eagerly. 

"I will," he said, rising from the table, 
and grasping my hand. ''I '11 stay here." 

I had a peculiar thrill of exultation and 
triumph. I know how the priest must feel, 
having won a soul from torment ! 

He was trembling with excitement and pale 
with emotion and weariness. One must begin 
the quiet life with rest. So I got him off to 
bed, first pouring him a bathtub of warm 
water. I laid out clean clothes by his bed- 
side and took away his old ones, talking to 
him cheerfully all the time about common 
things. When I finally left him and came 
downstairs I found Harriet standing with 
frightened eyes in the middle of the kitchen. 

'' I 'm afraid to have him sleep in this 
house," she said. 



CONTENTMENT 



151 



But I reassured her. ''You do not under- 
stand," I said. 

Owing to the excitement of the evening I 
spent a restless night. Before dayhght, while 
I was dreaming a strange dream of two men 
running, the one who pursued being the exact 
counterpart of the one who fled, I heard my 
name called aloud: 

"David, David!" 

I sprang out of bed. 

"The tramp has gone," called Harriet. 

He had not even slept in his bed. He had 
raised the window, dropped out on the ground 
and vanished. 




rfe* 



^/;- <>. 



^C^)-^/ 




X 

THE INFIDEL 



1FIND that we have an infidel in this 
community. I don't know that I should 
set down the fact here on good white paper; 
the walls, they say, have eyes, the stones 
have ears. But consider these words written 
in bated breath ! The worst of it is — I 
gather from common report — this infidel 
is a Cheerful Infidel, whereas a true infidel 
should bear upon his face the living mark of 
his infamy. We are all tolerant enough of 
those who do not agree with us, provided 
only they are sufficiently miserable ! I confess 

152 



ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 153 

when I first heard of him — through Mrs. 
Horace (with shudders) — 1 was possessed of a 
consuming secret desire to see him. I even 
thought of cHmbing a tree somewhere along 
the pubhc road — Hke Zaccheus, wasn't it? 
— and watching him go by. If by any 
chance he should look my way I could easily 
avoid discovery by crouching among the 
leaves. It shows how pleasant must be the 
paths of unrighteousness that we are tempted 
to climb trees to see those who walk therein. 
My imagination busied itself with the infidel. 
I pictured him as a sort of Moloch treading 
our pleasant countryside, flames and smoke 
proceeding from his nostrils, his feet striking 
fire, his voice like the sound of a great wind. 
At least that was the picture I formed of 
him from common report. 

And yesterday afternoon I met the infidel 
and I must here set down a true account of 
the adventure. It is, surely, a little new 
door opened in the house of my understand- 
ing. I might travel a whole year in a city, 
brushing men's elbows, and not once have 
such an experience. In country spaces men 
develop sensitive surfaces, not calloused by 
too frequent contact, accepting the new 



154 ADVENTURES IN 

impression vividly and keeping it bright to 
think upon. 

I met the infidel as the result of a rather 
unexpected series of incidents. I don't 
think I have said before that we have for 
some time been expecting a great event on 
this farm. We have raised corn and buck- 
wheat, we have a fertile asparagus bed and 
onions and pie-plant (enough to supply the 
entire population of this community) and I 
can't tell how many other vegetables. We 
have had plenty of chickens hatched out (I 
don't like chickens, especially hens, especially 
a certain gaunt and predatory hen named 
[so Harriet says] Evangeline, who belongs 
to a neighbour of ours) and we have had two 
litters of pigs, but until this bright moment 
of expectancy we never have had a calf. 

Upon the advice of Horace, which I often 
lean upon as upon a staff, I have been keep- 
ing my young heifer shut up in the cow-yard 
now for a week or two. But yesterday, 
toward the middle of the afternoon, I found 
the fence broken down and the cow-yard 
empty. From what Harriet said, the brown 
cow must have been gone since early morning. 
I knew, of course, what that meant, and 



CONTENTMENT 155 

straightway I took a stout stick and set off 
over the hill, tracing the brown cow as far as 
I could by her tracks. She had made way 
toward a clump of trees near Horace's wood 
lot, where I confidently expected to find her. 
But as fate would have it, the pasture gate, 
which is rarely used, stood open and the tracks 
led outward into an old road. I followed 
rapidly, half pleased that I had not found 
her within the wood. It was a promise of 
new adventure which I came to with down- 
right enjoyment (confidentially — I should 
have been cultivating com!). I peered into 
every thicket as I passed: once I climbed an 
old fence and, standing on the top rail, in- 
tently surveyed my neighbour's pasture. No 
brown cow was to be seen. At the crossing 
of the brook I shouldered my way from the 
road down a path among the alders, thinking 
the brown cow might have gone that way to 
obscurity. 

It is curious how, in spite of domestication 
and training, Nature in her great moments 
returns to the primitive and instinctive! 
My brown cow, never having had anything 
but the kindest treatment, is as gentle an 
animal as could be imagined, but she had 



156 ADVENTURES IN 

followed the nameless, ages-old law of her 
breed: she had escaped in her great moment 
to the most secret place she knew. It did not 
matter that she would have been safer in my 
yard — both she and her calf — that she would 
have been surer of her food; she could only 
obey the old wild law. So turkeys will hide 
their nests. So the tame duck, tame for un- 
numbered generations, hearing from afar the 
shrill cry of the wild drake, will desert her 
quiet surroundings, spread her little-used 
wings and become for a time the wildest of the 
wild. 

So we think — you and I — that we are 
civilised! But how often, how often, have 
we felt that old wildness which is our com- 
mon heritage, scarce shackled, clamouring in 
our blood! 

I stood listening among the alders, in the 
deep cool shade. Here and there a ray of 
sunshine came through the thick foliage: I 
could see it where it silvered the cobweb 
ladders of those moist spaces. Somewhere 
in the thicket I heard an unalarmed cat- 
bird trilling her exquisite song, a startled 
frog leaped with a splash into the water; 
faint odours of some blossoming growth, not 



CONTENTMENT 157 

distinguishable, filled the still air. It was one 
of those rare moments when one seems to 
have caught Nature unaware. I lingered a 
full minute, listening, looking; but my brown 
cow had not gone that way. So I turned and 
went up rapidly to the road, and there I 
found m^^self almost face to face with a ruddy 
little man whose countenance bore a look 
of round astonishment. We were both sur- 
prised. I recovered first. 

''Have you seen a brown cow?" I asked. 

He was still so astonished that he began 
to look around him; he thrust his hands nerv- 
ously into his coat pockets and pulled them 
out again. 

"I think you won't find her in there," I 
said, seeking to relieve his embarrassment. 

But I did n't know, then, how very serious 
a person I had encountered. 

"No — no," he stammered, ''I have n't seen 
your cow." 

So I explained to him with sobriety, and 
at some length, the problem I had to solve. 
He was greatly interested and inasmuch as 
he was going my way he offered at once to 
assist me in my search. So we set off to- 
gether. He was rather stocky of build, and 



158 ADVENTURES IN 

decidedly short of breath, so that I regulated 
my customary stride to suit his deliberation. 
At first, being filled with the spirit of my 
adventure, I was not altogether pleased with 
this arrangement. Our conversation ran some- 
thing like this: 

Stranger: Has she any spots or marks 
on her? 

Myself: No, she is plain brown. 

Stranger: How old a cow is she? 

Myself: This is her first calf. 

Stranger: Valuable animal? 

Myself: (fencing): I have never put a 
price on her; she is a promising young heifer. 

Stranger: Pure blood? 

Myself: No, grade. 

After a pause: 

Stranger: Live around here? 

Myself: Yes, half a mile below here. 
Do you? 

Stranger: Yes, three miles above here. 
My name 's Purdy. 

Myself: Mine is Grayson. 

He turned to me solemnly and held out his 
hand. "I'm glad to meet you, Mr. Gray- 
son,". he said. "And I 'm glad," I said, "to 
meet you, Mr. Purdy." 



CONTENTMENT 159 

I will not attempt to put down all we said: 
I could n't. But by such devices is the truth 
in the country made manifest. 

So we continued to walk and look. Oc- 
casionally I would unconsciously increase 
my pace until I was warned to desist by the 
puffing of Mr. Purdy. He gave an essential 
impression of genial timidity: and how he 
did love to talk! 

We came at last to a rough bit of land 
grown up to scrubby oaks and hazel brush. 

"This," said Mr."^ Purdy, "looks hopeful." 

We followed the old road, examining every 
bare spot of earth for some evidence of the 
cow's tracks, but without finding so much as 
a sign. I was for pushing onward but Mr. 
Purdy insisted that this clump of woods was 
exactly such a place as a cow would like. He 
developed such a capacity for argumentation 
and seemed so sure of what he was talking 
about that I yielded, and we entered the 
wood. 

"We'll part here," he said: "you keep 
over there about fifty yards and I '11 go straight 
ahead. In that way we '11 cover the ground. 
Keep a-shoutin'." 

So we started and I kept a-shoutin'. He 



i6o ADVENTURES IN 

would answer from time to time: "Hulloo, 
hulloo!" 

It was a wild and beautiful bit of forest. The 
ground under the trees was thickly covered 
with enormous ferns or bracken, with here 
and there patches of light where the sun came 
through the foliage. The low spots were 
filled with the coarse green verdure of skunk 
cabbage. I was so sceptical about finding 
the cow in a wood where concealment was so 
easy that I confess I rather idled and enjoyed 
the surroundings. Suddenly, however, I 
heard Mr. Purdy's voice, with a new note in it: 

"Hulloo, hulioo " 

''What luck?" 

''Hulioo, hulioo " 

" I 'm coming — " and I turned and ran as 
rapidly as I could through the trees, jumping 
over logs and dodging low branches, wonder- 
ing what new thing my friend had discovered. 
So I came to his side. 

"Have you got trace of her?" I questioned 
eagerly." 

"Sh!" he said, "over there. Don't you 
see her?" 

"Where, where?" 

He pointed, but for a moment I could see 



CONTENTMENT i6i 

nothing but the trees and the bracken. Then 
all at once, like the puzzle in a picture, I saw 
her plainly. She was standing perfectly mo- 
tionless, her head lowered, and in such a 
peculiar clump of bushes and ferns that she 
was all but indistinguishable. It was won- 
derful, the perfection with which her instinct 
had led her to conceal herself. 

All excitement, I started toward her at 
once. But Mr. Purdy put his hand on my 
arm. 

"Wait," he said, ** don't frighten her. She 
has her calf there." 

''No!" I exclaimed, for I could see nothing 
of it. 

We went, cautiously, a few steps nearer. 
She threw up her head and looked at us so 
wildly for a moment that I should hardly 
have known her for my cow. She was, in- 
deed, for the time being, a wild creature of 
the wood. She made a low sound and ad- 
vanced a step threateningly. 

"Steady," said Mr. Purdy, "this is her 
first calf. Stop a minute and keep quiet. 
She '11 soon get used to us." 

Moving to one side cautiously, we sat down 
on an old log. The brown heifer paused, 



i62 ADVENTURES IN 

every muscle tense, her eyes literally blazing. 
We sat perfectly still. After a minute or two 
she lowered her head, and with curious gut- 
tural sounds she began to lick her calf, which 
lay quite hidden in the bracken. 

"She has chosen a perfect spot," I thought 
to myself, for it was the wildest bit of forest 
I had seen anywhere in this neighbourhood. 
At one side, not far off, rose a huge gray 
rock, partly covered on one side with moss, 
and round about were oaks and a few ash 
trees of a poor scrubby sort (else they would 
long ago have been cut out). The earth 
underneath was soft and springy with leaf 
mould. 

Mr. Purdy was one to whom silence was 
painful; he fidgeted about, evidently bursting 
with talk, and yet feeling compelled to fol- 
low his own injunction of silence. Presently 
he reached into his capacious pocket and 
handed me a little paper-covered booklet. 
I took it, curious, and read the title: 

''Is There a Hell?" 

It struck me humorously. In the country 
we are always — at least some of us are — 
more or less in a religious ferment. The city 
may distract itself to the point where faith is 



CONTENTMENT 163 

unnecessary; buu in the country we must, 
perforce, have something to believe in. And 
we talk about it, too! I read the title aloud, 
but in a low voice: 

"Is There a Hell?" Then I asked: "Do 
you really want to know?" 

"The argument is all there," he replied. 

"Well," I said, "I can tell you off-hand, 
out of my own experience, that there cer- 
tainly is a hell " 

He turned toward me with evident aston- 
ishment, but I proceeded with tranquillity: 

" Yes, sir, there 's no doubt about it. I 've 
been near enough myself several times to 
smell the smoke. It isn 't around here," I 
said. 

As he looked at me his china-blue eyes 
grew larger, if that were possible, and his 
serious, gentle face took on a look of pained 
surprise. 

"Before you say such things," he said, 
" I beg you to read my book." 

He took the tract from my hands and 
opened it on his knee. 

"The Bible tells us," he said, "that in 
the beginning God created the heavens and 
the earth, He made the firmament and 



1 64 ADVENTURES IN 

divided the waters. But dor^s the Bible say 
that he created a hell or a devil ? Does it ? " 

I shook my head. 

"Well, then!" he said triumphantly, "and 
that is n't all, either. The historian Moses 
gives in detail a full account of what was 
made in six days. He tells how day and 
night were created, how the sun and the moon 
and the stars were made; he tells how God 
created the flowers of the field, and the insects, 
and the birds, and the great whales, and said, 
'Be fruitful and multiply.' He accounts for 
every minute of the time in the entire six 
days — and of course God rested on the 
seventh — and there is not one word about 
hell. Is there?" 

I shook my head. 

"Well then — " exultantly, "where is it? 
I 'd like to have any man, no matter how 
wise he is, answer that. Where is it?" 

"That," I said, "has troubled me, too. 
We don't always know just where our hells 
are. If we did we might avoid them. We 
are not so sensitive to them as we should be 
— do you think?" 

He looked at me intently: I went on 
before he could answer : 



CONTENTMENT 165 

''Why, I 've seen men in my time living 
from day to day in the very atmosphere of 
perpetual torment, and actually arguing that 
there was no hell. It is a strange sight, I 
assure you, and one that will trouble you 
afterwards. From what I know of hell, it is 
a place of very loose boundaries. Sometimes 
I 've thought we could n't be quite sure when 
we were in it and when we were not." 

I did not tell my friend, but I was think- 
ing of the remark of old Swedenborg: ''The 
trouble with hell is we shall not know it when 
we arrive." 

At this point Mr. Purdy burst out again, 
having opened his little book at another 
page. 

"When Adam and Eve had sinned," he 
said, "and the God of Heaven walked in the 
garden in the cool of the evening and called 
for them and they had hidden themselves 
on account of their disobedience, did God 
say to them: Unless you repent of your sins 
and get forgiveness I will shut you up in yon 
dark and dismal hell and torment you (or 
have the devil do it) for ever and ever? Was 
there such a word?" 

I shook my head. 




" Jle reached into his pocket and handed me a little paper-covered 

booklet " 



ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 167 

*'No, sir," he said venemently, ''there 
was not." 

''But does it say," I asked, "that Adam 
and Eve had not themselves been using 
their best wits in creating a hell? That 
point has occurred to me. In my experi- 
ence I Ve known both Adams and Eves who 
were most adroit in their capacity for mak- 
ing places of torment — and afterwards of 
getting into them. Just watch yourself some 
day after you 've sown a crop of desires and 
you '11 see promising little hells starting up 
within you like pigweeds and pusley after 
a warm rain in your garden. And our 
heavens, too, for that matter — they grow 
to our own planting: and how sensitive 
they are too! How soon the hot wind of a 
passion withers them away! How surely 
the fires of selfishness blacken their per- 
fection!" 

I 'd almost forgotten Mr. Purdy — and 
when I looked around, his face wore a pe- 
culiar puzzled expression not unmixed with 
alarm. He held up his little book eagerly, 
almost in my face. 

*'If God had intended to create a hell," 
he said, " I assert without fear of successful 



1 68 ADVENTURES IN 

contradiction that when God was there in 
the Garden of Eden it was the time for 
Him to have put Adam and Eve and all their 
posterity on notice that there was a place of 
everlasting torment. It would have been only 
a square deal for Him to do so. But did He? " 

I shook my head. 

''He did not. If He had mentioned hell 
on that occasion I should not now dispute 
its existence. But He did not. This is 
what He said to Adam — the very words : 
'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, 
till thou return unto the ground: for out of 
it thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and 
unto dust shalt thou return.' You see He 
did not say 'Unto hell shalt thou return.' He 
said, 'Unto dust.' That is n't hell, is it? " 

"Well," I said, "there are in my experi- 
ence a great many different kinds of hells. 
There are almost as many kinds of hells as 
there are men and women upon this earth. 
Now, your hell would n't terrify me in the 
least. My own makes me no end of trouble. 
Talk about burning pitch and brimstone: 
how futile were the imaginations of the old 
fellows who conjured up such puerile tor- 
ments. Why, I can tell you of no end of 



CONTENTMENT 169 

hells that are worse — and not half try. 
Once I remember, when I was younger " 

I happened to glance around at my com- 
panion. He sat there looking at me with 
horror — fascinated horror. 

''Well, I won't disturb your peace of mind 
by telling that story," I said. 

*'Do you believe that we shall go to hell?" 
he asked in a low voice. 

''That depends," I said. *' Let's leave 
out the question of 'we' ; let 's be more com- 
fortably general in our discussion. I think 
we can safely say that some go and some do 
not. It 's a curious and noteworthy thing," 
I said, "but I've known of cases — There 
are some people who are n't really worth 
good honest tormenting — let alone the re- 
wards of heavenly bliss. They just have n't 
anything to torment! What is going to 
become of such folks? I confess I don't 
know. You remember when Dante began 
his journey into the infernal regions — 

"I don't believe a word of that Dante," 
he interrupted excitedly; "it 's all a made up 
story. There isn't a word of truth in it; 
it is a blasphemous book. Let me read you 
what I say about it in here." 



I70 ADVENTURES IN 

**I will agree with yov without argument,'* 
I said, "that it is nc ; all true. I merely 
wanted to speak of < xie of Dante's experi- 
ences as an illustration of the point I 'm mak- 
ing. You remember that almost the first 
spirits he met on his journey w^ere those 
who had never done anything in this life 
to merit either heaven or hell. That always 
struck me as being about the worst plight 
imaginable for a human being. Think of a 
creature not even worth good honest 
brimstone!" 

Since I came home, I 've looked up the 
passage; and it is a wonderful one. Dante 
heard wailings and groans and terrible things 
said in many tongues. Yet these were not 
the souls of the wicked. They were only 
those "who had lived without praise or 
blame, thinking of nothing but themselves." 
"Heaven would not dull its brightness with 
those, nor would lower hell receive them." 

"And what is it," asked Dante, " that makes 
them so grievously suffer ? ' ' 

"Hopelessness of death," said Virgil. 
** Their blind existence here, and immem- 
orable former life, make them so wretched 
that they envy every other lot. Mercy and 



CONTENTMENT 171 

Justice alike disdain them. Let us speak 
of them no more. Look, and pass!" 

But Mr. Purdy, in spite of his timidity, 
was a man of much persistence. 

''They tell me," he said, ''when they try 
to prove the reasonableness of hell, that 
unless you show sinners how they 're goin' 
to be tormented, they 'd never repent. Now, 
I say that if a man has to be scared into 
religion, his religion ain't much good." 

"There," I said, "I agree with you com- 
pletely." 

His face lighted up, and he continued 
eagerly: 

"And I tell 'em: You just go ahead and 
try for heaven; don't pay any attention to 
all this talk about everlasting punishment." 

"Good advice!" I said. 

It had begun to grow dark. The brown 
cow was quiet at last. We could hear small 
faint sounds from the calf. I started slowly 
through the bracken. Mr. Purdy hung at 
my elbow, stumbling sideways as he walked, 
but continuing to talk eagerly. So we came 
to the place where the calf lay. I spoke in a 
low voice: 

"So boss, so boss." 



172 ADVENTURES IN 

I would have laid my hand on her neck 
but she started back with a wild toss of her 
horns. It was a beautiful calf! I looked at 
it with a peculiar feeling of exultation, pride, 
ownership. It was red-brown, with a round 
curly pate and one white leg. As it lay curled 
there among the ferns, it was really beautiful 
to look at. When we approached, it did not 
so much as stir. I lifted it to its legs, upon 
which the cow uttered a strange half -wild cry 
and ran a few steps off, her head thrown in the 
air. The calf fell back as though it had no legs. 

**She is telling it not to stand up," said 
Mr. Purdy. 

I had been afraid at first that something 
was the matter! 

"Some are like that," he said. ''Some 
call their calves to run. Others won't let 
you come near 'em at all; and I 've even 
known of a case where a cow gored its calf 
to death rather than let anyone touch it." 

I looked at Mr. Purdy not without a feel- 
ing of admiration. This was a thing he 
knew: a language not taught in the uni- 
versities. How well it became him to know 
it; how simply he expressed it! I thought 
to myself: There are not many men in this 



CONTENTMENT 173 

world, after all, that it will not pay us to go 
to school to — for something or other. 

I should never have been able, indeed, to 
get the cow and calf home, last night at least, 
if it had not been for my chance friend. He 
knew exactly what to do and how to do it. 
He wore a stout coat of denim, rather long 
in the skirts. This he slipped off, while 
I looked on in some astonishment, and spread 
it out on the ground. He placed my staff 
under one side of it and found another stick 
nearly the same size for the other side. These 
he wound into the coat until he had made a 
sort of stretcher. Upon this we placed the 
unresisting calf. What a fine one it was! 
Then, he in front and I behind, we carried the 
stretcher and its burden out of the wood. 
The cow followed, sometimes threatening, 
sometimes bellowing, sometimes starting off 
wildly, head and tail in the air, only to rush 
back and, venturing up with trembling mus- 
cles, touch her tongue to the calf, uttering 
low maternal sounds. 

"Keep steady," said Mr. Purdy, ''and 
everything '11 be all right." 

When we came to the brook we stopped 
to rest. I think my companion would have 



174 ADVENTURES IN 

liked to start his argument again, but he 
was too short of breath. 

It was a prime spring evening! The frogs 
were tuning up. I heard a drowsy cow- 
bell somewhere over the hills in the pasture. 
The brown cow, with eager, outstretched 
neck, was licking her calf as it lay there on 
the improvised stretcher. I looked up at 
the skv, a blue avenue of heaven between 
the tree tops; I felt the peculiar sense of 
mystery which nature so commonly conveys. 

*' I have been too sure!" I said. **What do 
we know after all ! Why may there not be 
future heavens and hells — 'other heavens 
for other earths ' ? We do not know — we 
do not know 

So, carrying the calf, in the cool of the 
evening, we came at last to my yard. We 
had no sooner put the calf down than it 
jumped nimbly to its feet and ran, wobbling 
absurdly, to meet its mother. 

''The rascal," I said, "after all our work." 

"It 's the nature of the animal," said Mr. 
Purdy, as he put on his coat. 

I could not thank him enough. I invited 
him to stay with us to supper, but he said 
he must hurry home. 



CONTENTMENT 175 

^'Then come down soon to see me," I said, 
**and we will settle this question as to the 
existence of a hell." 

He stepped up close to me and said, with 
an appealing note in his voice : 

''You do not really believe in a hell, do 
you?" 

How human nature loves conclusiveness: 
nothing short of the categorical will satisfy 
us! What I said to Mr. Purdy evidently 
appeased him, for he seized my hand and 
shook and shook. 

*'We haven't understood each other," 
he said eagerly. ''You don't believe in 
eternal damnation any more than I do." 
Then he added, as though some new un- 
certainty puzzled him, "Do you?" 

At supper I was telling Harriet with 
gusto of my experiences. Suddenly she 
broke out: 

" What was his name? " 

"Purdy." 

"Why, he's the infidel that Mrs. Horace 
tells about!" 

"Is that possible?" I said, and I dropped 
my knife and fork. The strangest sensation 
came over me. 



176 ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 

"Why," I said, "then I 'm an infidel too!" 

So I laughed and I 've been laughing 
gloriously ever since — at myself, at the in- 
fidel, at the entire neighbourhood. I recalled 
that delightful character in "The Vicar of 
Wakefield" (my friend the Scotch Preacher 
loves to tell about him), who seasons error 
by crying out "Fudge!" 

"Fudge!" I said. 

We 're all poor sinners! 





XI 

THE COUNTRY DOCTOR 



Sunday afternoon, June g. 

WE HAD a funeral to-day in this com- 
munity and the longest funeral pro- 
cession, Charles Baxter says, he has seen in 
all the years of his memory among these hills. 
A good man has gone away — and yet re- 
mains. In the comparatively short time I 
have been here I never came to know him w^ell 
personally, though I saw him often in the 
country roads, a ruddy old gentleman with 
thick, coarse, iron-gray hair, somewhat stem 

177 



178 ADVENTURES IN 

of countenance, somewhat shabby of attire, 
sitting as erect as a trooper in his open buggy, 
one muscular hand resting on his knee, the 
other holding the reins of his familiar old 
white horse. I said I did not come to know 
him well personally, and yet no one who 
knows this community can help knowing 
Doctor John North. I never so desired the 
gift of moving expression as I do at this 
moment, on my return from his funeral, that I 
may give some faint idea of what a good 
man means to a community like ours — as 
the more complete knowledge of it has come 
to me to-day. 

In the district school that I attended when 
a boy we used to love to leave our mark, 
as we called it, wherever our rovings led us. 
It was a bit of boyish mysticism, unaccount- 
able now that we have grown older and wiser 
(perhaps) ; but it had its meaning. It was 
an instinctive outreaching of the young soul 
to perpetuate the knowledge of its existence 
upon this forgetful earth. My mark, I 
remember, was a notch and a cross. With 
what secret fond diligence I carved it in the 
gray bark of beech trees, on fence posts, or 
on barn doors, and once, I remember, on the 



CONTENTMENT 179 

roof-ridge of our home, and once, with high 
imaginings of how long it would remain, I 
spent hours chiseling it deep in a hard-headed 
old boulder in the pasture, where, if man 
has been as kind as Nature, it remains to this 
day. If you should chance to see it you 
would not know of the boy who carved it 
there. 

So Doctor North left his secret mark upon 
the neighbourhood — as all of us do, for 
good or for ill, upon our neighbourhoods, in 
accordance with the strength of that char- 
acter which abides within us. For a long 
time I did not know that it was he, though 
it was not difficult to see that some strong 
good man had often passed this way. I saw 
the mystic sign of him deep-lettered in the 
hearthstone of a home; I heard it speaking 
bravely from the weak lips of a friend ; it is 
carved in the plastic heart of many a boy. 
No, I do not doubt the immortalities of the 
soul ; in this community, which I have come 
to love so much, dwells more than one of John 
North's immortalities — and will continue 
to dwell. I, too, live more deeply because 
John North was here. 

He was in no outward way an extraordinary 



i8o ADVENTURES IN 

man, nor was his life eventful. He was 
born in this neighbourhood: I saw him lying 
quite still this morning in the same sunny 
room of the same house where he first saw 
the light of day. Here among these com- 
mon hills he grew up, and save for the few 
years he spent at school or in the army, he 
lived here all his life long. In old neighbour- 
hoods and especially farm neighbourhoods 
people come to know one another — not 
clothes knowledge, or money knowledge — 
but that sort of knowledge which reaches 
down into the hidden springs of human 
character. A country community may be 
deceived by a stranger, too easily deceived, 
but not by one of its own people. For it is 
not a studied knowledge; it resembles that 
slow geologic uncovering before which not 
even the deep buried bones of the prehistoric 
saurian remain finally hidden. 

I never fully realised until this morning 
what a supreme triumph it is, having grown 
old, to merit the respect of those who know 
us best. Mere greatness offers no reward to 
compare with it, for greatness compels that 
homage which we freely bestow upon good- 
ness. So long as I live I shall never forget this 



CONTENTMENT i8i 

morning. I stood in the door-yard outside 
of the open window of the old doctor's home. 
It was soft, and warm, and very still — a 
June Sunday morning. An apple tree not 
far off was still in blossom, and across the 
road on a grassy hillside sheep fed uncon- 
cernedly. Occasionally, from the roadway 
where the horses of the countryside were 
waiting, I heard the clink of a bit-ring or the 
low voice of some new-comer seeking a place 
to hitch. Not half those who came could 
find room in the house : they stood uncovered 
among the trees. From within, wafted 
through the window, came the faint odour 
of flowers, and the occasional minor into- 
nation of someone speaking — and finally our 
own Scotch Preacher! I could not see him, 
but there lay in the cadences of his voice a 
peculiar note of peacefulness, of finality. 
The day before he died Dr. North had said: 

*'I want McAlway to conduct my funeral, 
not as a minister but as a man. He has been 
my friend for forty years; he will know 
what I mean." 

The Scotch Preacher did not say much. 
Why should he? Everyone there knew: 
and speech would only have cheapened what 



1 82 ADVENTURES IN 

we knew. And I do not now recall even the 
little he said, for there was so much all about 
me that spoke not of the death of a good 
man, but of his life. A boy who stood near 
me — a boy no longer, for he was as tall as a 
man — gave a more eloquent tribute than 
any preacher could have done. I saw him 
stand his ground for a time with that grim 
courage of youth which dreads emotion more 
than a battle: and then I saw him crying 
behind a tree! He was not a relative of the 
old doctor's; he was only one of many into 
whose deep life the doctor had entered. 

They sang ''Lead, Kindly Light," and 
came out through the narrow doorway into 
the sunshine with the coffin, the hats of the 
pall-bearers in a row on top, and there was 
hardly a dry eye among us. 

And as they came out through the narrow 
doorway, I thought how the Doctor must have 
looked out daily through so many, many 
years upon this beauty of hills and fields and 
of sky above, grown dearer from long famil- 
iarity — which he would know no more. 
And Kate North, the Doctor's sister, his only 
relative, followed behind, her fine old face 
gray and set, but without a tear in her eye. 



CONTENTMENT 183 

How like the Doctor she looked: the same 
stern control! 

In the hours which followed, on the pleasant 
winding way to the cemetery, in the groups 
under the trees, on the way homeward again, 
the community spoke its true heart, and I 
have come back with the feeling that human 
nature, at bottom, is sound and sweet. I 
knew a great deal before about Doctor North, 
but I knew it as knowledge, not as emotion, 
and therefore it was not really a part of my 
life. 

I heard again the stories of how he drove 
the country roads, winter and summer, how 
he had seen most of the population into the 
world and had held the hands of many who 
went out! It was the plain, hard life of a 
country doctor, and yet it seemed to rise in our 
community like some great tree, its roots deep 
buried in the soil of our common life, 
its branches close to the sky. To those 
accustomed to the outward excitements of 
city life it would have seemed barren and un- 
eventful. It was significant that the talk was 
not so much of what the Doctor did as of hoiv 
he did it, not so much of his actions as of the 
natural expression of his character. And 



1 84 ADVENTURES IN 

when we come to think of it, goodness is 
uneventful. It does not flash, it glows. It 
is deep, quiet and very simple. It passes not 
with oratory, it is commonly foreign to riches, 
nor does it often sit in the places of the mighty : 
but may be felt in the touch of a friendly hand 
or the look of a kindly eye. 

Outwardly, John North often gave the im- 
pression of brusqueness. Many a woman, 
going to him for the first time, and until she 
learned that he was in reality as gentle as a 
girl, was frightened by his manner. The 
country is full of stories of such encounters. 
We laugh yet over the adventure of a woman 
who formerly came to spend her summers 
here. She dressed very beautifully and was 
"nervous." One day she went to call on the 
Doctor. He made a careful examination and 
asked many questions. Finally he said, with 
portentous solemnity: 

''Madam, you're suffering from a very 
common complaint." 

The Doctor paused, then continued, im- 
pressively : 

"You haven't enough work to do. This 
is what I would advise. Go home, discharge 
your servants, do your own cooking, wash 



CONTENTMENT 185 

your own clothes and make your own beds. 
You 11 get well." 

She is reported to have been much offended, 
and yet to-day there was a wreath of white 
roses in Doctor North's room sent from the 
city by that woman. 

If he really hated anything in this world 
the Doctor hated whimperers. He had a deep 
sense of the purpose and need of punishment, 
and he despised those who fled from whole- 
some discipline. 

A young fellow once went to the Doctor — 
so they tell the story — and asked for some- 
thing to stop his pain. 

''Stop it!" exclaimed the Doctor: "why, 
it 's good for you. You 've done wrong, 
haven't you? Well, you 're being punished; 
take it like a man. There 's nothing more 
wholesome than good honest pain." 

And yet how much pain he alleviated in 
this community — in forty years ! 

The deep sense that a man should stand up 
to his fate was one of the key-notes of his 
character ; and the way he taught it, not only 
by word but by every action of his life, put 
heart into many a weak man and woman. 
Mrs. Patterson, a friend of ours, tells of a reply 



1 86 ADVENTURES IN 

she once had from the Doctor to whom she 
had gone with a new trouble. After telHng 
him about it she said: 

^'I Ve left it all with the Lord." 

" You 'd have done better," said the Doctor, 
''to keep it yourself. Trouble is for your 
discipline: the Lord doesn't need it." 

It was thus out of his wisdom that he was 
always telling people what they knew, deep 
down in their hearts, to be true. It some- 
times hurt at first, but sooner or later, if the 
man had a spark of real manhood in him, he 
came back, and gave the Doctor an abiding 
affection. 

There were those who, though they loved 
him, called him intolerant. I never could 
look at it that way. He did have the only 
kind of intolerance which is at all tolerable, 
and that is the intolerance of intolerance. 
He always set himself with vigour against that 
unreason and lack of sympathy which are the 
essence of intolerance; and yet there was a 
rock of conviction on many subjects behind 
which he could not be driven. It was not 
intolerance: it was with him a reasoned cer- 
tainty of belief. He had a phrase to express 
that not uncommon state of mind, in this age 



CONTENTMENT 187 

particularly, which is politely willing to yield 
its foothold within this universe to almost any 
reasoner who suggests some other universe, 
however shadowy, to stand upon. He called 
it a *'mush of concession." He might have 
been wrong in his convictions, but he, at least, 
never floundered in a *'mush of concession." 
I heard him say once: 

"There are some things a man can't concede, 
and one is, that a man who has broken a law, 
like a man who has broken a leg, has got to 
suffer for it." 

It was only with the greatest difficulty that 
he could be prevailed upon to present a bill. 
It was not because the community was poor, 
though some of our people are poor, and it 
was certainly not because the Doctor was rich 
and could afford such philanthropy, for, saving 
a rather unproductive farm which during the 
last ten years of his life lay wholly unculti- 
vated, he was as poor as any man in the 
community. He simply seemed to forget that 
people owed him. 

It came to be a common and humorous 
experience for people to go to the Doctor and 
say: 

"Now Doctor North, how much do I owe 



1 88 ADVENTURES IN 

you? You remember you attended my wife 
two years ago when the baby came — and 

John when he had the diphtheria " 

*' Yes, yes," said the Doctor, '' I remember." 
**I thought I ought to pay you." 
'' Well, I '11 look it up when I get time." 
But he would n't. The only way was to 
go to him and say: 

"Doctor, I want to pay ten dollars on 
account." 

**A11 right," he 'd answer, and take the 
money. 

To the credit of the community I may say 
with truthfulness that the Doctor never suf- 
fered. He was even able to supply himself 
with the best instruments that money could 
buy. To him nothing was too good for our 
neighbourhood. This morning I saw in a 
case at his home a complete set of oculist's 
instruments, said to be the best in the county 
— a very unusual equipment for a country 
doctor. Indeed, he assumed that the respon- 
sibility for the health of the community rested 
upon him. He was a sort of self-constituted 
health officer. He was always sniffing about 
for old wells and damp cellars — and some- 
how, with his crisp himiour and sound sense. 



CONTENTMENT 189 

getting them cleaned. In his old age he even 
grew querulously particular about these 
things — asking a little more of human 
nature than it could quite accomplish. There 
were innumerable other ways — how they 
came out to-day all glorified now that he is 
gone! — in which he served the community. 

Horace tells how he once met the Doctor 
driving his old white horse in the town 
road. 

''Horace," called the Doctor, "why don't 
you paint your barn?" 

"Well," said Horace, "it is beginning to 
look a bit shabby." 

"Horace," said the Doctor, "you're a 
prominent citizen. We look to you to keep 
up the credit of the neighbourhood." 

Horace painted his barn. 

I think Doctor North was fonder of Charles 
Baxter than of anyone else, save his sister. 
He hated sham and cant : if a man had a single 
reality in him the old Doctor found it; and 
Charles Baxter in many ways exceeds^ny man 
I ever knew in the downright quality of gen- 
uineness. The Doctor was never tired of 
telling — and with humour — how he once 
went to Baxter to have a table made for his 



I go ADVENTURES IN 

office. When he came to get it he found the 
table upside down and Baxter on his knees 
finishing off the under part of the drawer 
sHdes. Baxter looked up and smiled in the 
engaging way he has, and continued his work. 
After watching him for some time the Doctor 
said: 

"Baxter, why do you spend so much time 
on that table? Who 's going to know whether 
or not the last touch has been put on the under 
side of it?" 

Baxter straightened up and looked at the 
Doctor in surprise. 

"Why, I will," he said. 

How the Doctor loved to tell that story! I 
warrant there is no boy who ever grew up in 
this country who has n't heard it. 

It was a part of his pride in finding reality 
that made the Doctor such a lover of true 
sentiment and such a hater of sentimentality. 
I prize one memory of him which illustrates 
this point. The district school gave a " speak- 
ing" and we all went. One boy with a fresh 
young voice spoke a "soldier piece" — the 
soliloquy of a one-armed veteran who sits at 
a window and sees the troops go by with danc- 
ing banners and glittering bayonets, and the 



CONTENTMENT 191 

people cheering and shouting. And the re- 
frain went something Hke this : 

"Never again call 'Comrade' 

To the men who were comrades for years; 
Never again call ' Brother' 

To the men we think of with tears." 

I happened to look around while the boy 
was speaking, and there sat the old Doctor 
with the tears rolling unheeded down his ruddy 
face; he was thinking, no doubt, of his war 
time and the comrades he knew. 

On the other hand, how he despised fustian 
and bombast. His *'Bah!" delivered explo- 
sively, was often like a breath of fresh air in 
a stuffy room. Several years ago, before I 
came here — and it is one of the historic stories 
of the county — there was a semi-political 
Fourth of July celebration with a number of 
ambitious orators. One of them, a young 
fellow of small worth who wanted to be elected 
to the legislature, made an impassioned ad- 
dress on " Patriotism." The Doctor was pres- 
ent, for he liked gatherings: he liked people. 
But he did not like the young orator, and did 
not want him to be elected. In the midst of 
the speech, while the audience was being 



192 ADVENTURES IN 

carried through the clouds of oratory, the 
Doctor was seen to be growing more and more 
uneasy. Finally he burst out: 

"Bah!" 

The orator caught himself, and then swept 
on again. 

*'Bah!" said the Doctor. 

By this time the audience was really in- 
terested. The orator stopped. He knew the 
Doctor, and he should have known better than 
to say what he did. But he was very young 
and he knew the Doctor was opposing him. 

''Perhaps," he remarked sarcastically, "the 
Doctor can make a better speech than I can." 

The Doctor rose instantly, to his full height 

— and he was an impressive-looking man. 
"Perhaps," he said, "I can, and what is 

more, I will." He stood up on a chair and gave 
them a talk on Patriotism — real patriotism 

— the patriotism of duty done in the small 
concerns of life. That speech, which ended 
the political career of the orator, is not for- 
gotten to-day. 

One thing I heard to-day about the old 
Doctor impressed me deeply. I have been 
thinking about it ever since: it illuminates 
his character more than anything I have 



CONTENTMENT 193 

heard. It is singular, too, that I should not 
have known the story before. I don't believe 
it was because it all happened so long ago ; it 
rather remained untold out of deference to a 
sort of neighbourhood delicacy. 

I had, indeed, wondered why a man of 
such capacities, so many qualities of real 
greatness and power, should have escaped a 
city career. I said something to this effect 
to a group of men with whom I was talking 
this morning. I thought they exchanged 
glances; one said: 

" When he first came out of the army he 'd 
made such a fine record as a surgeon that 
everyone urged him to go to the city and 
practice " 

A pause followed which no one seemed 

inclined to fill. 

"But he did n't go," I said. 

"No, he didn't go. He was a brilliant 
young fellow. He knew a lot, and he was 
popular, too. He 'd have had a great 
success 

Another pause. 

" But he did n't go? " I asked promptingly. 

"No; he staid here. He was better edu- 
cated than any man in this county. Why, 



194 ADVENTURES IN 

I 've seen him more 'n once pick up a book of 
Latin and read it for pleasure.'' 

I could see that all this was purposely 
irrelevant, and I liked them for it. But walk- 
ing home from the cemetery Horace gave me 
the story; the community knew it to the last 
detail. I suppose it is a story not uncommon 
among men, but this morning, told of the old 
Doctor we had just laid away, it struck me 
with a tragic poignancy difficult to describe. 

''Yes," said Horace, ''he was to have been 
married, forty years ago, and the match was 
broken off because he was a drunkard." 

"A drunkard!" I exclaimed, with a shock 
I cannot convey. 

"Yes, sir," said Horace, "one o' the worst 
you ever see. He got it in the army. Hand- 
some, wild, brilliant — that was the Doctor. 
I was a little boy but I remember it mighty 
well." 

He told me the whole distressing story. It 
was all a long time ago and the details do not 
matter now. It was to be expected that a 
man like the old Doctor should love, love 
once, and love as few men do. And that is 
what he did — and the girl left him because 
he was a drunkard ! 



<•/! 




THjy^f^s P^c.^,^ j.^ 



" HE PUT AN OPEN BOTTLE ON HIS TABLE AND LOOKED AT IT.'* 



CONTENTMENT 195 

**They all thought," said Horace, "that 
he 'd up an' kill himself. He said he would, 
but he did n't. Instid o' that he put an open 
bottle on his table and he looked at it and 
said: 'Which is stronger, now, you or John 
North? We '11 make that the test,' he said, 
'we'll live or die by that.' Them was his 
exact words. He could n't sleep nights and 
he got haggard like a sick man, but he left 
the bottle there and never touched it." 

How my heart throbbed with the thought 
of that old silent struggle! How much it 
explained ; how near it brought all these peo- 
ple around him ! It made him so human. It 
is the tragic necessity (but the salvation) of 
many a man that he should come finally to an 
irretrievable experience, to the assurance that 
everything is lost. For with that moment, 
if he be strong, he is saved. I wonder if any- 
one ever attains real human sympathy who 
has not passed through the fire of some such 
experience. Or to humour either! For in 
the best laughter do we not hear constantly 
that deep minor note which speaks of the 
ache in the human heart? It seems to me I 
can understand Doctor North! 

He died Friday morning. He had been 



196 ADVENTURES IN 

lying very quiet all night ; suddenly he opened 
his eyes and said to his sister: ''Good-bye, 
Kate," and shut them again. That was all. 
The last call had come and he was ready for it. 
I looked at his face after death. I saw the 
iron lines of that old struggle in his mouth 
and chin ; and the humour that it brought him 
in the lines around his deep-set eyes. 

And as I think of him this afternoon, I 

can see him — curiously, for I can hardly ex- 
plain it — carrying a banner as in battle right 
here among our quiet hills. And those he 
leads seem to be the people we know, the men, 
and the women, and the boys! He is the 
hero of a new age. In olden days he might 
have been a pioneer, carrying the light of 
civilisation to a new land ; here he has been a 
sort of moral pioneer — a pioneering far more 
difficult than any we have ever known. There 
are no heroics connected with it, the name of 
the pioneer will not go ringing down the ages; 
for it is a silent leadership and its success is 
measured by victories in other lives. We see 
it now, only too dimly, when he is gone. We 
reflect sadly that we did not stop to thank 
him. How busy we were with our own affairs 
when he was among us! I wonder is there 



CONTENTMENT 



197 



anyone here to take up the banner he has laid 
down! 

1 forgot to say that the Scotch Preacher 

chose the most impressive text in the Bible for 
his talk at the funeral: 

" He that is greatest among you, let him be . . . 
as he that doth serve." 

And we came away with a nameless, ach- 
ing sense of loss, thinking how, perhaps, in a 
small way, we might do something for some- 
body else — as the old Doctor did. 





XII 

AN EVENING AT HOME 

*' How calm and quiet a delight 
Is it, alone, 
To read and meditate and write, 

By none offended, and offending none! 
To walk, ride, sit or sleep at one's own ease ; 

And, pleasing a man's self, none other to displease." 
— Charles Cotton, a friend of Izaak Walton, 1650 



DURING the last few months so many of 
the real adventures of life have been 
out of doors and so much of the beauty, too, 

that I have scarcely written a word about my 

198 



ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 199 

books. In the summer the days are so long 
and the work so engrossing that a farmer is 
quite wilHng to sit quietly on his porch after 
supper and watch the long evenings fall — 
and rest his tired back, and go to bed early. 
But the winter is the true time for indoor 
enjoyment ! 

Days like these! A cold night after a cold 
day! Well wrapped, you have made arctic 
explorations to the stable, the chicken-yard 
and the pig-pen; you have dug your way 
energetically to the front gate, stopping every 
few minutes to beat your arms around your 
shoulders and watch the white plume of your 
breath in the still air — and you have rushed 
in gladly to the warmth of the dining-room and 
the lamp-lit supper. After such a day how 
sharp your appetite, how good the taste of 
food! Harriet's brown bread (moist, with 
thick, sweet, dark crusts) was never quite so 
delicious, and when the meal is finished 3^ou 
push back your chair feeling like a sort of 
lord. 

''That was a good supper, Harriet," you 
say expansively. 

"Was it?" she asks modestly, but with 
evident pleasure. 



200 ADVENTURES IN 

''Cookery," you remark, "is the greatest 
art in the world ' ' 

''Oh, you were hungry!" 

"Next to poetry," you conclude, "and 
much better appreciated. Think how easy 
it is to find a poet who will turn you a pre- 
sentable sonnet, and how very difficult it is to 
find a cook who will turn you an edible beef- 
steak " 

I said a good deal more on this subject 
which I shall not attempt to repeat. Har- 
riet did not listen through it all. She knows 
what I am capable of when I really get started ; 
and she has her well-defined limits. A prac- 
tical person, Harriet! When I have gone 
about so far, she begins clearing the table or 
takes up her mending — but I don't mind it 
at all. Having begun talking, it is wonder- 
ful how pleasant one's own voice becomes. 
And think of having a clear field — and no 
interruptions ! 

My own particular room, where I am per- 
mitted to revel in the desert of my own dis- 
order, opens comfortably off the sitting- 
room. A lamp with a green shade stands 
invitingly on the table shedding a circle of 
light on the books and papers underneath, 



CONTENTMENT 201 

but leaving all the remainder of the room in 
dim pleasantness. At one side stands a com- 
fortable big chair with everything in arm's 
reach, including my note books and ink bottle. 
Where I sit I can look out through the open 
doorway and see Harriet near the fireplace 
rocking and sewing. Sometimes she hums 
a little tune which I never confess to hearing, 
lest I miss some of the unconscious cadences. 
Let the wind blow outside and the snow drift 
in piles around the doorway and the blinds 
rattle — I have before me a whole long pleas- 
ant evening. 

What a convenient and delightful world 
is this world of books 1 — if you bring to it 
not the obligations of the student, or look 
upon it as an opiate for idleness, but enter 
it rather with the enthusiasm of the adven- 
turer! It has vast advantages over the ordi- 
nary world of daylight, of barter and trade, 
of work and worry. In this world every 
man is his own King — the sort of King one 
loves to imagine, not concerned in such petty 
matters as wars and parliaments and taxes, 
but a mellow and moderate despot who is a 
true patron of genius — a mild old chap who 



202 ADVENTURES IN 

has in his court the greatest inen and women 
in the world — and all of them vying to 
please the most vagrant of his moods! In- 
vite any one of them to talk, and if your 
highness is not pleased with him you have 
only to put him back in his corner — and 
bring some jester to sharpen the laughter of 
your highness, or some poet to set your 
faintest emotion to music! 

I have marked a certain servility in books. 
They entreat you for a hearing: they cry out 
from their cases — like men, in an eternal 
struggle for survival, for immortality. 

''Take me," pleads this one, "I am re- 
sponsive to every mood. You will find in 
me love and hate, virtue and vice. I don't 
preach: I give you life as it is. You will 
find here adventures cunningly linked with 
romance and seasoned to suit the most 
fastidious taste. Try me.'' 

"Hear such talk!" cries his neighbour. 
" He 's fiction. What he says never hap- 
pened at all. He tries hard to make you 
believe it, but it is n't true, not a word of it. 
Now, I 'm fact. Everything you find in me 
can be depended upon." 

''Yes," responds the other, "but who 



CONTENTMENT 203 

cares ! Nobody wants to read you, you 're 
dull." 

"You're false!" 

As their voices grow shriller with argu- 
ment your highness listens with the indul- 
gent smile of royalty when its courtiers con- 
tend for its favour, knowing that their very 
life depends upon a wrinkle in your august 
brow. 

As for me I confess to being a rather crusty 
despot. When Horace was over here the 
other evening talking learnedly about silos 
and ensilage I admit that I became the very 
pattern of humility, but when I take my 
place in the throne of my arm-chair with 
the light from the green-shaded lamp falling 
on the open pages of my book, I assure you 
I am decidedly an autocratic person. My 
retainers must distinctly keep their places! 
I have my court favourites upon whom I 
lavish the richest gifts of my attention. 
I reserve for them a special place in the 
worn case nearest my person, where at the 
mere outreaching of an idle hand I can 
summon them to beguile my moods. The 
necessary slavies of literature I have arranged 



504 ADVENTURES IN 

in indistinct rows at the farther end of the 
room where they can be had if I require 
their special accompHshments. 

How little, after all, learning counts in 
this world either in books or in men. I have 
often been awed by the wealth of information 
I have discovered in a man or a book : I have 
been awed and depressed. How wonderful, 
I have thought, that one brain should hold so 
much, should be so infallible in a world of 
fallibility. But I have observed how soon 
and completely such a fount of information 
dissipates itself. Having only things to give, 
it comes finally to the end of its things: it is 
empty. What it has hived up so painfully 
through many a studious year comes now to 
be common property. We pass that way, 
take our share, and do not even say "Thank 
you." Learning is like money; it is of pro- 
digious satisfaction to the possessor thereof, 
but once given forth it diffuses itself swiftly. 

''What have you?" we are ever asking 
of those we meet. '' Information, learning, 
money?" 

We take it cruelly and pass onward, for 
such is the law of material possessions. 



CONTENTMENT 205 

"What have you?" we ask. "Charm, 
personality, character, the great gift of unex- 
pectedness?" 

How we draw you to us! We take you in. 
Poor or ignorant though you may be, we 
link arms and loiter; we love you not for 
what you have or what you give us, but for 
what you are. 

I have several good friends (excellent peo- 
ple) who act always as I expect them to act. 
There is no flight! More than once I have 
listened to the edifying conversation of a 
certain sturdy old gentleman whom I know, 
and I am ashamed to say that I have thought : 

"Lord! if he would jump up now and turn 
an intellectual handspring, or slap me on 
the back (figuratively, of course: the other 
would be unthinkable) , or — yes, swear ! I — 
think I could love him." 

But he never does — and I 'm afraid he 
never will! 

When I speak then of my books you will 
know what I mean. The chief charm of 
literature, old or new, lies in its high quality 
of surprise, unexpectedness, spontaneity: high 
spirits applied to life. We can fairly hear 
some of the old chaps you and I know laughing 



2o6 ADVENTURES IN 

down through the centuries. How we love 'em ! 
They laughed for themselves, not for us ! 

Yes, there must be surprise in the books 
that I keep in the worn case at my elbow, 
the surprise of a new personality perceiving 
for the first time the beauty, the wonder, 
the humour, the tragedy, the greatness of 
truth. It does n't matter at all whether the 
writer is a poet, a scientist, a traveller, an 
essayist or a mere daily space-maker, if he 
have the God-given grace of wonder. 

"What on earth are you laughing about?" 
cries Harriet from the sitting-room. 

When I have caught my breath, I say, 
holding up my book: 

"This absurd man here is telling of the 
adventures of a certain chivalrous Knight." 

"But I can't see how you can laugh out 
like that, sitting all alone there. Why, it 's 
uncanny." 

"You don't know the Knight, Harriet, 
nor his squire Sancho." 

"You talk of them just as though they 
were real persons." 

"Real!" I exclaim, "real! Why they are 
much more real than most of the people we 



CONTENTMENT 207 

know. Horace is a mere wraith compared 
with Sancho." 

And then I rush out. 

"Let me read you this," I say, and I read 
that matchless chapter wherein the Knight, 
having clapped on his head the helmet which 
Sancho has inadvertently used as a recep- 
tacle for a dinner of curds and, sweating 
whey profusely, goes forth to fight two 
fierce lions. As I proceed with that pro- 
digious story, I can see Harriet gradually 
forgetting her sewing, and I read on the more 
furiously until, coming to the point of the 
conflict wherein the generous and gentle lion, 
having yawned, "threw out some half yard of 
tongue wherewith he licked and washed his 
face," Harriet begins to laugh. 

"There!" I say triumphantly. 

Harriet looks at me accusingly. 

" Such foolishness ! " she says. " Why should 
any man in his senses try to fight caged lions ! ' ' 

'"Harriet," I say, ''you are incorrigible." 

She does not deign to reply, so I return 
with meekness to my room. 

The most distressing thing about the ordi- 
nary fact writer is his cock-sureness. Why, 



2o8 ADVENTURES IN 

here is a man (I have not yet dropped him 
out of the window) who has written a large 
and sober book explaining life. And do 
you know when he gets through he is appar- 
ently much discouraged about this universe. 
This is the veritable moment when I am in 
love with my occupation as a despot ! At 
this moment I will exercise the prerogative 
of tyranny : 

"Off with his head!" 

I do not believe this person though he 
have ever so many titles to jingle after his 
name, nor in the colleges which gave them, 
if they stand sponsor for that which he writes. 
I do not believe he has compassed this uni- 
verse. I believe him to be an inconsequent 
being like myself — oh, much more learned, 
of course — and yet only upon the threshold 
of these wonders. It goes too deep — life — 
to be solved by fifty years of living. There 
is far too much in the blue firmament, too 
many stars, to be dissolved in the feeble logic 
of a single brain. We are not yet great 
enough, even this explanatory person, to 
grasp the ''scheme of things entire." This 
is no place for weak pessimism — this uni- 
verse. This is Mystery and out of Mystery 



CONTENTMENT 209 

springs the fine adventure! What we have 
seen or felt, what we think we know, are 
insignificant compared with that which may 
be known. 

What this person explains is not, after 
all, the Universe — but himself, his own 
limited; faithless personality. I shall not 
accept his explanation. I escape him 
utterly ! 

Not long ago, coming in from my fields, 
I fell to thinking of the supreme wonder 
of a tree; and as I walked I met the 
Professor. 

''How," I asked, ''does the sap get up to 
the top of these great maples and elms? 
What power is there that should draw it up- 
ward against the force of gravity?" 

He looked at me a moment with his pecu- 
liar slow smile. 

"I don't know," he said. 

"What!" I exclaimed, "do you mean to 
tell me that science has not solved this sim- 
plest of natural phenomena ? ' ' 

"We do not know," he said. "We ex- 
plain, but we do not know." 

No, my Explanatory Friend, we do not 
know — we do not know the why of the 



2IO ADVENTURES IN 

flowers, or the trees, or the suns; we do not 
even know why, in our own hearts, we should 
be asking this curious question — and other 
deeper questions. 

No man becomes a great writer unless he 
possesses a highly developed sense of Mys- 
tery, of wonder. A great writer is never 
blas^; everything to him happened not longer 
ago than this forenoon. 

The other night the Professor and the 
Scotch Preacher happened in here together 
and we fell to discussing, I hardly know 
how, for we usually talk the neighbour- 
hood chat of the Starkweathers, of Horace 
and of Charles Baxter, we fell to discuss- 
ing old Izaak Walton — and the nonsense 
(as a scientific age knows it to be) which 
he sometimes talked with such delightful 
sobriety. 

"How superior it makes one feel, in behalf 
of the enlightenment and progress of his 
age," said the Professor, *'when he reads 
Izaak's extraordinary natural history." 

''Does it make you feel that way?" asked 
the Scotch Preacher. "It makes me want 
to go fishing." 



CONTENTMENT 



211 



And he took the old book and turned the 
leaves until he came to page 54. 

"Let me read you," he said, "what the 
old fellow says about the 'fearfulest of 
fishes.' 

" ' . . . Get secretly behind a tree, and stand as 
free from motion as possible ; then put a grasshopper 
on your hook, and let your hook hang a quarter of 
a yard short of the water, to which end you must rest 
your rod on some bough of a tree; but it is likely 
that the Chubs will sink down towards the bottom 
of the water at the first shadow of your rod, for a 
Chub is the fearfulest of fishes, and will do so if but 
a bird flies over him and makes the least shadow 
on the water; but they will presently rise up to the 
top again, and there lie soaring until some shadow 
affrights them again; I say, when they lie upon the 
top of the water, look at the best Chub, which you, 
getting yourself in a fit place, may very easily see, 
and move your rod as slowly as a snail moves, to 
that Chub you intend to catch, let your bait fall 
gently upon the water three or four inches before 
him, and he will infallibly take the bait, and you 
will be as sure to catch him. . , . Go your way 
presently, take my rod, and do as I bid you, and I 
will sit down and mend my tackling till you return 
back '" 

"Now T say," said the Scotch Preacher, 
" that it makes me want to go fishing." 



212 ADVENTURES IN 

''That," I said, *'is true of every great 
book: it either makes us want to do things, 
to go fishing, or fight harder or endure more 
patiently — or it takes us out of ourselves 
and beguiles us for a time with the friend- 
ship of completer lives than our own." 

The great books indeed have in them the 
burning fire of life; 

. . . . *'nay, they do preserve, as in a violl, 
the purest efficacie and extraction of that living 
intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, 
and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous 
Dragon's teeth; which being sown up and down, may 
chance to spring up armed men." 

How soon we come to distinguish the books 
of the mere writers from the books of real 
men! For true literature, like happiness, is 
ever a by-product; it is the half-conscious 
expression of a man greatly engaged in some 
other undertaking; it is the song of one work- 
ing. There is something inevitable, unre- 
strainable about the great books ; they seemed 
to come despite the author. *'I could not 
sleep," says the poet Horace,*' for the pressure 
of unwritten poetry." Dante said of his 
books that they "made him lean for many 



CONTENTMENT 213 

days." I have heard people say of a writer 
in explanation of his success: 

*' Oh, well, he has the literary knack." 
It is not so! Nothing is further from the 
truth. He writes well not chiefly because 
he is interested in writing, or because he 
possesses any especial knack, but because 
he is more profoundly, vividly interested in 
the activities of life and he tells about them — 
over his shoulder. For writing, like farming, 
is ever a tool, not an end. 

How the great one-book men remain with 
us! I can see Marcus Aurelius sitting in his 
camps among the far barbarians writing out 
the reflections of a busy life. I see William 
Penn engaged in great undertakings, setting 
down ''Some of the Fruits of Solitude," and 
Abraham Lincoln striking, in the hasty 
paragraphs written for his speeches, one of 
the highest notes in our American literature. 

"David?" 
"Yes, Harriet." 

" I am going up now; it is very late." 
"Yes." 

"You will bank the fire and see that the 
doors are locked ? ' ' 



214 ADVENTURES IN 

"Yes." 

After a pause: ''And, David, I didn't 
mean — about the story you read. Did the 
Knight finally kill the lions?" 

''No," I said with sobriety, *'it was not 
finally necessary." 

"But I thought he set out to kill them." 

" He did ; but he proved his valour without 
doing it." 

Harriet paused, made as if to speak again, 
but did not do so. 

"Valour" — I began in my hortatory tone, 
seeing a fair opening, but at the look in her 
eye I immediately desisted. 

"You won't stay up late?" she warned. 

"N-o," I said. 

Take John Bunyan as a pattern of the man 
who forgot himself into immortality. How 
seriously he wrote sermons and pamphlets, 
now happily forgotten! But it was not 
until he was shut up in jail (some writers I 
know might profit by his example) that he 
"put aside," as he said, "a more serious 
and important work" and wrote "Pilgrim's 
Progress." It is the strangest thing in the 
world — the judgment of men as to what is 



CONTENTMENT 215 

important and serious! Bunyan says in his 
rhymed introduction: 

**I only thought to make 
I knew not what: nor did I undertake 
Thereby to please my neighbour; no, not I: 
I did it my own self to gratify." 

Another man I love to have at hand is he 
who writes of Blazing Bosville, the Flaming 
Tinman, and of The Hairy Ones. 

How Borrow escapes through his books! 
His object was not to produce literature but 
to display his erudition as a master of lan- 
guage and of outlandish custom, and he 
went about the task in all seriousness of 
demolishing the Roman Catholic Church. 
We are not now so impressed with his eru- 
dition that we do not smile at his vanity and 
we are quite contented, even after reading 
his books, to let the church survive; but 
how shall we spare our friend with his in- 
extinguishable love of life, his pugilists, his 
gypsies, his horse traders? We are even 
willing to plow through arid deserts of 
dissertation in order that we may enjoy 
the perfect oases in which the man forgets 
himself! 



2i6 ADVENTURES IN 

Reading such books as these and a hundred 

others, the books of the worn case at my 

elbow, 

** The bulged and the bruised octavos, 

The dear and the dumpy twelves " 

I become like those initiated in the Eleusin- 
ian mysteries who, as Cicero tells us, have 
attained ''the art of living joyfully and of 
dying with a fairer hope." 

It is late, and the house is still. A few 
bright embers glow in the fireplace. You 
look up and around you, as though coming 
back to the world from some far-off place. 
The clock in the dining-room ticks with 
solemn precision; you did not recall that it 
had so loud a tone. It has been a great 
evening; in this quiet room on your farm, 
you have been able to entertain the worthies 
of all the past ! 

You walk out, resoundingly, to the kitchen 
and open the door. You look across the 
still white fields. Your barn looms black in 
the near distance, the white mound close at 
hand is your wood-pile, the great trees stand 
like sentinels in the moonlight; snow has 
drifted upon the doorstep and lies there 



CONTENTMENT 



217 



untracked. . It is, indeed, a dim and un- 
tracked world: coldly beautiful but silent — 
and of a strange unreality! You close the 
door with half a shiver and take the real world 
with you up to bed. For it is past one o'clock. 




" The beauty, the wonder, the humour, the tragedy, the greatness of 

truth " 




XIII 



THE POLITICIAN 



IN THE city, as I now recall it (having 
escaped), it seemed to be the instinc- 
tive purpose of every citizen I knew not to 
get into politics but to keep out. We sedu- 
lously avoided caucuses and school-meetings, 
our time was far too precious to be squandered 
in jury service, we forgot to register for elec- 
tions, we neglected to vote. We observed a 
sort of aristocratic contempt for political 
activity and then fretted and fumed over the 
low estate to which our government had 
fallen — and never saw the humour of it all. 

2lS 



ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 219 

At one time I experienced a sort of political 
awakening: a ''boss" we had was more than 
ordinarily piratical. I think he had a scheme 
to steal the city hall and sell the monuments 
in the park (something of that sort), and I, 
for one, was disturbed. For a time I really 
wanted to bear a man's part in helping to 
correct the abuses, only I did not know how 
and could not find out. 

In the city, when one would learn any- 
thing about public matters, he turns, not to 
life, but to books or newspapers. What we 
get in the city is not life, but what someone 
else tells us about life. So I acquired a really 
formidable row of works on Political Economy 
and Government (I admire the word "works" 
in that application) where I found Society 
laid out for me in the most perfect order — 
with pennies on its eyes. How often, look- 
ing back, I see myself as in those days, read- 
ing my learned books with a sort of fury of 
interest! — 

From the reading of books I acquired a 
sham comfort. Dwelling upon the excellent 
theory of our institutions, I was content to 
disregard the realities of daily practice. I 
acquired a mock assurance under which I 



2 20 ADVENTURES IN 

proceeded complacently to the polls, and cast 
my vote without knowing a single man on the 
ticket, what he stood for, or what he really 
intended to do. The ceremony of the ballot 
bears to politics much the relationship that 
the sacrament bears to religion: how often, 
observing the formality, we yet depart wholly 
from the spirit of the institution. 

It was good to escape that place of hurrying 
strangers. It was good to get one's feet down 
into the soil. It was good to be in a place 
where things are because they grow, and poli- 
tics, not less than corn! Oh, my friend, say 
what you please, argue how you like, this 
crowding together of men and women in 
unnatural surroundings, this haste to be rich 
in material things, this attempt to enjoy with- 
out production, this removal from first-hand 
life, is irrational, and the end of it is ruin. If 
our cities were not recruited constantly with 
the fresh, clean blood of the country, with 
boys who still retain some of the power and 
the vision drawn from the soil, where would 
they be! 

"We 're a great people," says Charles Bax- 
ter, ''but we don't always work at it." 



i 



CONTENTMENT 



221 



"But we talk about it," says the Scotch 
Preacher. 

**By the way," says Charles Baxter, "have 
you seen George Warren? He 's up for super- 



visor." 



"I haven't yet." 

"Well, go around and see him. We must 
find out exactly what he intends to do with 
the Summit Hill road. If he is weak on that 
we 'd better look to Matt Devine. At least 
Matt is safe." 

The Scotch Preacher looked at Charles 
Baxter and said to me with a note of admira- 
tion in his voice: 

"Isn't this man Baxter getting to be in- 
tolerable as a political boss!" 

Baxter's shop! Baxter's shop stands close 
to the road and just in the edge of a grassy old 
apple orchard. It is a low, unpainted build- 
ing, with generous double doors in front, 
standing irresistibly open as you go by. Even 
as a stranger coming here first from the city 
I felt the call of Baxter's shop. Shall I ever 
forget ! It was a still morning — one of those 
days of warm sunshine — and perfect quiet 
in the country — and birds in the branches 



222 ADVENTURES IN 

— and apple trees all in bloom. Baxter was 
whistling at his work in the sunlit doorway of 
his shop, in his long, faded apron, much worn 
at the knees. He was bending to the rhythmic 
movement of his plane, and all around him 
as he worked rose billows of shavings. And 
oh, the odours of that shop! the fragrant, 
resinous odour of new-cut pine, the pungent 
smell of black walnut, the dull odour of oak 
wood — how they stole out in the sunshine, 
waylaying you as you came far up the road, 
beguiling you as you passed the shop, and 
stealing reproachfully after you as you went 
onward down the road. 

Never shall I forget that grateful moment 
when I first passed Baxter's shop — a failure 
from the city — and Baxter looking out at 
me from his deep, quiet, gray eyes — eyes 
that were almost a caress ! 

My wayward feet soon took me, unintro- 
duced, within the doors of that shop, the first 
of many visits. And I can say no more in 
appreciation of my ventures there than that 
I came out always with more than I had when 
I went in. 

The wonders there! The long bench with 
its huge- jawed wooden vises, and the little 



CONTENTMENT 223 

dusty windows above looking out into the 
orchard, and the brown planes and the row of 
shiny saws, and the most wonderful pattern 
squares and triangles and curves, each hang- 
ing on its own peg ; and above, in the rafters, 
every sort and size of curious wood. And oh! 
the old bureaus and whatnots and high-boys 
in the corners waiting their turn to be mended ; 
and the sticky glue-pot waiting, too, on the 
end of the sawhorse. There is family history 
here in this shop — no end of it — the small 
and yet great (because intensely human) 
tragedies and humours of the long, quiet years 
among these sunny hills. That whatnot there, 
the one of black walnut with the top knocked 
off, that belonged in the old days to 

"Charles Baxter," calls my friend Pat- 
terson from the roadway, ''can you frs. my 
cupboard?" 

''Bring it in," says Charles Baxter, hos- 
pitably, and Patterson brings it in, and stops 
to talk — and stops — and stops — There 
is great talk in Baxter's shop — the slow- 
gathered wisdom of the country, the lore of 
crops and calves and cabinets. In Baxter's 
shop we choose the next President of these 
United States! 



2 24 ADVENTURES IN 

You laugh! But we do — exactly that. It 
is in the Baxters' shops (not in Broadway, not 
in State Street) where the presidents are de- 
cided upon. In the little grocery stores you 
and I know, in the blacksmithies, in the school- 
houses back in the country ! 

Forgive me! I did not intend to wander 
away. I meant to keep to my subject — but 
the moment I began to talk of politics in the 
country I was beset by a compelling vision 
of Charles Baxter coming out of his shop 
in the dusk of the evening, carrying his 
curious old reflector lamp and leading the way 
down the road to the schoolhouse. And 
thinking of the lamp brought a vision of the 
joys of Baxter's shop, and thinking of the 
shop brought me naturally around to politics 
and presidents; and here I am again where 
I started! 

Baxter's lamp is, somehow, inextricably 
associated in my mind with politics. Being 
busy farmers, we hold our caucuses and other 
meetings in the evening and usually in the 
schoolhouse. The schoolhouse is conveniently 
near to Baxter's shop, so we gather at Bax- 
ter's shop. Baxter takes his lamp down 



CONTENTMENT 225 

from the bracket above his bench, reflector 
and all, and you will see us, a row of dusky 
figures, Baxter in the lead, proceeding down 
the roadway to the schoolhouse. Having 
arrived, some one scratches a match, shields 
it with his hand (I see yet the sudden fitful 
illumination of the brown-bearded, watchful 
faces of my neighbours!) and Baxter guides 
us into the schoolhouse — with its shut-in 
dusty odours of chalk and varnished desks 
and — yes, left-over lunches! 

Baxter's lamp stands on the table, casting 
a vast shadow of the chairman on the wall. 

"Come to order," says the chairman, and 
we have here at this moment in operation the 
greatest institution in this round world: the 
institution of free self-government. Great 
in its simplicity, great in its unselfishness! 
And Baxter's old lamp with its smoky tm 
reflector, is not that the veritable torch of our 

liberties ? 

This, I forgot to say, though it makes no 
special difference — a caucus would be the 
same — is a school meeting. 

You see, ours is a prolific community. 
When a young man and a young w^oman are 
married they think about babies; they want 



2 26 ADVENTURES IN 

babies, and what is more, they have them! 
and love them afterward ! It is a part of the 
complete life. And having babies, there must 
be a place to teach them to live. 

Without more explanation you will under- 
stand that we needed an addition to our 
schoolhouse. A committee reported that the 
amount required would be $800. We talked 
it over. The Scotch Preacher was there with 
a plan which he tacked up on the black- 
board and explained to us. He told us of 
seeing the stone-mason and the carpenter, 
he told us what the seats would cost, and the 
door knobs and the hooks in the closet. We 
are a careful people; we want to know where 
every penny goes ! 

"If we put it all in the budget this year 
what will that make the rate?" inquires a 
voice from the end of the room. 

We don't look around; we know the voice. 
And when the secretary has computed the 
rate, if you listen closely you can almost hear 
the buzz of multiplications and additions 
which is going on in each man's head as he 
calculates exactly how much the addition 
will mean to him in taxes on his farm, his 
daughter's piano, his wife's top-buggy. 



CONTENTMENT 227 

And many a man is saying to himself: 

**If we build this addition to the school- 
house, I shall have to give up the new over- 
coat I have counted upon, or Amanda won't 
be able to get the new cooking-range." 

That's real politics: the voluntary surren- 
der of some private good for the upbuilding 
of some community good. It is in such exer- 
cises that the fibre of democracy grows sound 
and strong. There is, after all, in this world 
no real good for which we do not have to 
surrender something. In the city the average 
voter is never conscious of any surrender. He 
never realises that he is giving anything him- 
self for good schools or good streets. Under 
such conditions how can you expect self- 
government? No service, no reward! 

The first meeting that I sat through watch- 
ing those bronzed farmers at work gave me 
such a conception of the true meaning of self- 
government as I never hoped to have. 

"This is the place where I belong," I said 
to myself. 

It was wonderful in that school meeting to 
see how every essential element of our govern- 
ment was brought into play. Finance? We 
discussed whether we should put the entire 



228 ADVENTURES IN 

$800 into the next year's budget or divide it, 
paying part in cash and bonding the district 
for the remainder. The question of credit, 
of interest, of the obHgations of this genera- 
tion and the next, were all discussed. At one 
time long ago I was amazed when I heard my 
neighbours arguing in Baxter's shop about the 
issuance of certain bonds by the United States 
government: how completely they under- 
stood it! I know now where they got that 
understanding. Right in the school meetings 
and town caucuses where they raise money 
yearly for the expenses of our small govern- 
ment ! There is nothing like it in the city. 

The progress of a people can best be judged 
by those things which they accept as matters- 
of-fact. It was amazing to me, coming from 
the city, and before I understood, to see how 
ingrained had become some of the principles 
which only a few years ago were fiercely- 
mooted problems. It gave me a new pride 
in my country, a new appreciation of the steps 
in civilisation which we have already per- 
manently gained. Not a question have I 
ever heard in any school meeting of the neces- 
sity of educating every American child — at 
any cost. Think of it! Think how far we 



CONTENTMENT 229 

have come in that respect, in seventy — yes, 
fifty — years. Universal education has be- 
come a settled axiom of our life. 

And there was another point — so com- 
mon now that we do not appreciate the sig- 
nificance of it. I refer to majority rule. In 
our school meeting we were voting money out 
of men's pockets — money that we all needed 
for private expenses — and yet the moment 
the minority, after full and honest discussion, 
failed to maintain its contention in opposition 
to the new building, it yielded with perfect 
good humour and went on with the discussion 
of other questions. When you come to 
think of it, in the light of history, is not that a 
wonderful thing ? 

One of the chief property owners in our 
neighbourhood is a rather crabbed old bach- 
elor. Having no children and heavy taxes to 
pay, he looks with jaundiced eye on additions 
to schoolhouses. He will object and growl 
and growl and object, and yet pin him down 
as I have seen the Scotch Preacher pin him 
more than once, he will admit that children 
(''of course," he will say, ''certainly, of 
course") must be educated. 

" For the good of bachelors as well as other 



230 ADVENTURES IN 

people?'' the Scotch Preacher will press it 
home. 

''Certainly, of course." 

And when the final issue comes, after full 
discussion, after he has tried to lop off a few 
yards of blackboard or order cheaper desks 
or dispense with the clothes-closet, he votes 
for the addition with the rest of us. 

It is simply amazing to see how much grows 
out of those discussions — how much of that 
social sympathy and understanding which is 
the very tap-root of democracy. It 's cheaper 
to put up a miserable shack of an addition. 
Why not do it? So we discuss architecture 
— blindly, it is true; we don't know the books 
on the subject — but we grope for the big 
true things, and by our own discussion we 
educate ourselves to know why a good build- 
ing is better than a bad one. Heating and 
ventilation in their relation to health, the use 
of ''fad studies" — how I have heard those 
things discussed ! 

How Dr. North, who has now left us for- 
ever, shone in those meetings, and Charles 
Baxter and the Scotch Preacher — broad men, 
every one — how they have explained and 
argued, with what patience have they brought 



CONTENTMENT 231 

into that small schoolhouse, lighted by Charles 
Baxter's lamp, the grandest conceptions of 
himian society — not in the big words of the 
books, but in the simple, concrete language 
of our common life. 

*' Why teach physiology? " 

What a talk Dr. North once gave us on 
that! 

" Why pay a teacher $40 a month when one 
can be had for $30?" 

You should have heard the Scotch Preacher 
answer that question! Many a one of us 
went away with some of the education which 
we had come, somewhat grudgingly, to buy 
for our children. 

These are our political bosses: these un- 
known patriots, who preach the invisible pa- 
triotism which expresses itself not in flags 
and oratory, but in the quiet daily surrender 
of private advantage to the public good. 

There is, after all, no such thing as perfect 
equality; there must be leaders, flag-bearers, 
bosses — whatever you call them. Some men 
have a genius for leading; others for following; 
each is necessary and dependent upon the 
other. In cities, that leadership is often per- 
verted and used to evil ends. Neither leaders 



232 ADVENTURES IN 

nor followers seem to understand. In its 
essence politics is merely a mode of expressing 
human sympathy. In the country many and 
many a leader like Baxter works faithfully year 
in and year out, posting notices of caucuses, 
school meetings and elections, opening cold 
schoolhouses, talking to candidates, prodding 
selfish voters — and mostly without reward. 
Occasionally they are elected to petty offices 
where they do far more work than they are 
paid for (we have our eyes on 'em) ; often they 
are rewarded by the power and place which 
leadership gives them among their neighbours, 
and sometimes — and that is Charles Baxter's 
case — they simply like it ! Baxter is of the 
social temperament: it is the natural expres- 
sion of his personality. As for thinking of 
himself as a patriot, he would never dream 
of it. Work with the hands, close touch with 
the common life of the soil, has given him much 
of the true wisdom of experience. He knows 
us and we know him; he carries the banner, 
holds it as high as he knows how, and we 
follow. 

Whether there can be a real democracy (as 
in a city) where there is not that elbow- 
knowledge, that close neighbourhood sympa- 



CONTENTMENT 233 

thy, that conscious surrender of little personal 
goods for bigger public ones, I don't know. 

We haven't many foreigners in our dis- 
trict, but all three were there on the night we 
voted for the addition. They are Polish. 
Each has a farm where the whole family works 
— and puts on a little more Americanism 
each year. They 're good people. It is sur- 
prising how much all these Poles, Italians, 
Germans and others, are like us, how perfectly 
human they are, when we know them person- 
ally! One Pole here, named Kausky, I have 
come to know pretty well, and I declare I 
have forgotten that he is a Pole. There 's 
nothing like the rub of democracy! The 
reason why we are so suspicious of the for- 
eigners in our cities is that they are crowded 
together in such vast, unknown, undigested 
masses. We have swallowed them too fast, 
and we suffer from a sort of national dyspepsia. 

Here in the country we promptly digest our 
foreigners and they make as good Americans 
as anybody. 

"Catch a foreigner when he first comes 
here," says Charles Baxter, ''and he takes to 
our politics like a fish to water." 

The Scotch Preacher says they *'gape for 



234 ' ADVENTURES IN 

education." And when I see Kausky's six 
children going by in the morning to school, 
all their round, sleepy, fat faces shining with 
soap, I believe it! Baxter tells with humour 
how he persuaded Kausky to vote for the 
addition to the schoolhouse. It was a pretty 
stiff tax for the poor fellow to pay, but Baxter 
''figgered children with him," as he said. 
With six to educate, Baxter showed him that 
he was actually getting a good deal more than 
he paid for! 

Be it far from me to pretend that we are 
always right or that we have arrived in our 
country at the perfection of self-government. 
I do not wish to imply that all of our people 
are interested, that all attend the caucuses 
and school-meetings (some of the most 
prominent never come near — they stay away, 
and if things don 't go right they blame 
Charles Baxter ! ) Nor must I over-emphasise 
the seriousness of our public interest. But we 
certainly have here, if anywhere in this nation, 
real self-government. Growth is a slow process. 
We often fail in our election of delegates to State 
conventions; we sometimes vote wrong in 
national affairs. It is an easy thing to think 
school district; difficult, indeed, to think 



CONTENTMENT 235 

State or nation. But we grow. When we make 
mistakes, it is not because we are evil, but 
because we don't know. Once we get a clear 
understanding of the right or wrong of any 
question you can depend upon us — abso- 
lutely — to vote for what is right. With more 
education we shall be able to think in larger 
and larger circles — until we become, finally, 
really national in our interests and sympathies. 
Whenever a man comes along who knows 
how simple we are, and how much we really 
want to do right, if we can be convinced that 
a thing is right — who explains how the rail- 
road question, for example, affects us in our 
intimate daily lives, what the rights and 
wrongs of it are, why, we can understand and 
do understand — and we are ready to act. 

It is easy to rally to a flag in times of ex- 
citement. The patriotism of drums and 
marching regiments is cheap; blood is ma- 
terial and cheap ; physical weariness and hun- 
ger are cheap. But the struggle I speak of is 
not cheap. It is dramatised by few symbols. 
It deals with hidden spiritual qualities within 
the conscience of men. Its heroes are yet 
unsung and unhonoured. No combats in all 
the world's history were ever fought so high 



236 ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT 

upward in the spiritual air as these; and, 
surely, not for nothing! 

And so, out of my experience both in city 
and country, I feel — yes, I know — that the 
real motive power of this democracy lies back 
in the little country neighbourhoods like ours 
where men gather in dim schoolhouses and 
practice the invisible patriotism of surrender 
and service. 







TK 




'w^fl^ 



XIV 



THE HARVEST 



" Oh, Universe, what thou wishest, I wish." 

— Marcus Aurelius. 

1C0ME to the end of these Adventures 
with a regret I can scarcely express. 
I, at least, have enjoyed them. I began 
setting them down with no thought of publi- 
cation, but for my own enjoyment; the 
possibility of a book did not suggest itself 
until afterwards. I have tried to relate the 
experiences of that secret, elusive, invisible 
life which in every man is so far more real, so 
far more important than his visible activities — 

237 



238 ADVENTURES IN 

the real expression of a life much occupied in 
other employment. 

When I first came to this farm, I came 
empty-handed. I was the veritable pattern 
of the city-made failure. I believed that 
life had nothing more in store for me. I 
was worn out physically, mentally and, in- 
deed, morally. I had diligently planned for 
Success; and I had reaped defeat. I came 
here without plans. I plowed and harrowed 
and planted, expecting nothing. In due 
time I began to reap. And it has been 
a growing marvel to me, the diverse and 
unexpected crops that I have produced within 
these uneven acres of earth. With sweat 
I planted corn, and I have here a crop not 
only of corn but of happiness and hope. My 
tilled fields have miraculously sprung up to 
friends ! 

This book is one of the unexpected pro- 
ducts of my farm. It is this way with 
the farmer. After the work of planting and 
cultivating, after the rain has fallen in his 
fields, after the sun has warmed them, after 
the new green leaves have broken the earth — 
one day he stands looking out with a certain 
new joy across his acres (the wind bends and 



CONTENTMENT 239 

half turns the long blades of the corn) and 
there springs up within him a song of the 
fields. No matter how little poetic, how 
little articulate he is, the song rises irre- 
pressibly in his heart, and he turns aside from 
his task with a new glow of fulfillment and 
contentment. At harvest time in our country 
I hear, or I imagine I hear, a sort of chorus 
rising over all the hills, and I meet no man 
who is not, deep down within him, a singer! 
So song follows work: so art grows out of life! 
And the friends I have made! They have 
come to me naturally, as the corn grows in 
my fields or the wind blows in my trees. 
Some strange potency abides within the soil 
of this earth! When tw^o men stoop (there 
must be stooping) and touch it together, a 
magnetic current is set up between them: a 
flow of common understanding and confi- 
dence. I would call the attention of all great 
Scientists, Philosophers, and Theologians to 
this phenomenon: it will repay investigation. 
It is at once the rarest and the commonest 
thing I know. It shows that down deep 
within us, where we really live, we are all 
a good deal alike. We have much the 
same instincts, hopes, joys, sorrows. If only 



240 ADVENTURES IN 

it were not for the outward things that 
we commonly look upon as important (which 
are in reality not at all important) we might 
come together without fear, vanity, envy, 
or prejudice and be friends. And what a 
world it would be! If civilisation means 
anything at all it means the increasing ability 
of men to look through material possessions, 
through clothing, through differences of speech 
and colour of skin, and to see the genuine 
man that abides within each of us. It means 
an escape from symbols! 

I tell this merely to show what surprising 
and unexpected things have grown out of 
my farm. All along I have had more than I 
bargained for. From now on I shall marvel 
at nothing! When I ordered my own life I 
failed; now that I work from day to day, 
doing that which I can do best and which 
most delights me, I am rewarded in ways that 
I could not have imagined. Why, it would 
not surprise me if heaven were at the end of 
all this! 

Now, I am not so foolish as to imagine that 
a farm is a perfect place. In these Adven- 
tures I have emphasised perhaps too forcibly 
the joyful and pleasant features of my life. 



CONTENTMENT 241 

In what I have written I have naturally 
chosen only those things which were most 
interesting and charming. My life has not been 
without discouragement and loss and loneli- 
ness (loneliness most of all). I have enjoyed 
the hard work ; the little troubles have troubled 
me more than the big ones. I detest un- 
harnessing a mudd}^ horse in the rain! I 
don't like chickens in the barn. And some- 
how Harriet uses an inordinate amount of 
kindling wood. But once in the habit, un- 
pleasant things have a way of fading quickly 
and quietly from the memory. 

And you see after living so many years in 
the city the worst experience on the farm is a 
sort of joy! 

In most men as I come to know them — I 
mean men who dare to look themselves in 
the eye — I find a deep desire for more 
naturalness, more directness. How weary 
we all grow of this fabric of deception which 
is called modern life. How passionately we 
desire to escape but cannot see the way! 
How our hearts beat with sympathy when 
we find a man who has turned his back upon 
it all and who says " I will live it no longer." 
How we flounder in possessions as in a dark 



242 ADVENTURES IN 

and suffocating bog, wasting our energies 
not upon life but upon things. Instead of 
employing our houses, our cities, our gold, 
our clothing, we let these inanimate things 
possess and employ us — to what utter weari- 
ness. ''Blessed be nothing," sighs a dear 
old lady of my knowledge. 

Of all ways of escape I know, the best, 
though it is far from perfection, is the farm. 
There a man may yield himself most nearly 
to the quiet and orderly processes of nature. 
He may attain most nearly to that equi- 
librium between the material and spiritual, 
with time for the exactions of the first, and 
leisure for the growth of the second, which 
is the ideal of life. 

In times past most farming regions in this 
country have suffered the disadvantages of iso- 
lation, the people have dwelt far distant from 
one another and from markets, they have had 
little to stimulate them intellectually or socially. 
Strong and peculiar individuals and families 
were often developed at the expense of a friendly 
community life:^ neighbourhood feuds were 
common. Country life was marked with the 
rigidity of a hard provincialism. All this, 
however, is rapidly changing. The closer 



CONTENTMENT 243 

settlement of the land, the rural delivery of 
mails (the morning newspaper reaches the tin 
box at the end of my lane at noon) , the farmer's 
telephone, the spreading country trolleys, 
more schools and churches, and cheaper rail- 
road rates, have all helped to bring the far- 
mer's life well within the stimulating currents 
of world thought without robbing it of its 
ancient advantages. And those advantages 
are incalculable: Time first for thought and 
reflection (narrow streams cut deep) leading 
to the growth of a sturdy freedom of action — 
which is, indeed, a natural characteristic of 
the man who has his feet firmly planted upon 
his own land. 

A city hammers and polishes its denizens 
into a defined model: it worships standard- 
isation; but the country encourages differ- 
entiation, it loves new types. Thus it is 
that so many great and original men have 
lived their youth upon the land. It would 
be impossible to imagine Abraham Lincoln 
brought up in a street of tenements. Family 
life on the farm is highly educative; there is 
more discipline for a boy in the continuous 
care of a cow or a horse than in many a term 
of school. Industry, patience, perseverance 



244 ADVENTURES IN 

are qualities inherent in the very atmosphere 
of country Hfe. The so-called manual train- 
ing of city schools is only a poor makeshift for 
developing in the city boy those habits which 
the country boy acquires naturally in his 
daily life. An honest, hard-working country 
training is the best inheritance a father can 
leave his son. 

And yet a farm is only an opportunity, a 
tool. A cornfield, a plow, a woodpile, an oak 
tree, will cure no man unless he have it in 
himself to be cured. The truth is that no 
life, and least of all a farmer's life, is simple 
— unless it is simple. I know a man and his 
wife who came out here to the country with 
the avowed purpose of becoming, forthwith, 
simple. They were tmable to keep the 
chickens out of their summer kitchen. They 
discovered microbes in the well, and mos- 
quitoes in the cistern, and wasps in the garret. 
Owing to the resemblance of the seeds, their 
radishes turned out to be turnips! The last 
I heard of them they were living snugly in a 
flat in Sixteenth Street — all their troubles 
solved by a dumb-waiter. 

The great point of advantage in the life of 
the country is that if a man is in reality sim- 



vc 







CONTENTMENT 245 

pie, if he love true contentment, it is the place 
of all places where he can live his life most 
freely and fully, where he can grow. The 
city affords no such opportunity; indeed, it 
often destroys, by the seductiveness with 
which it flaunts its carnal graces, the desire 
for the higher life which animates every 
good man. 

While on the subject of simplicity it may 
be well to observe that simplicity does not 
necessarily, as some of those who escape from 
the city seem to think, consist in doing with- 
out things, but rather in the proper use of 
things. One cannot return, unless with af- 
fectation, to the crudities of a former existence. 
We do not believe in Diogenes and his tub. 
Do you not think the good Lord has given us 
the telephone (that we may better reach that 
elbow-rub of brotherhood which is the high- 
est of human ideals) and the railroad (that we 
may widen our human knowledge and sym- 
pathy) — and even the motor-car ? (though, 
indeed, I have sometimes imagined that the 
motor-cars passing this way had a different 
origin!). He may have given these things 
to us too fast, faster than we can bear; but 
is that any reason why we should denounce 



246 ADVENTURES IN 

them all and return to the old, crude, time- 
consuming ways of our ancestors? I am no 
reactionary. I do not go back. I neglect no 
tool of progress. I am too eager to know 
every wonder in this universe. The motor- 
car, if I had one, could not carry me fast 
enough! I must yet fly! 

After my experience in the country, if I 
were to be cross-examined as to the requisites 
of a farm, I should say that the chief thing 
to be desired in any sort of agriculture, is 
good health in the farmer. What, after all, 
can touch that ! How many of our joys that 
we think intellectual are purely physical! 
This joy o' the morning that the poet carols 
about so cheerfully, is often nothing more 
than the exuberance produced by a good hot 
breakfast. Going out of my kitchen door 
some mornings and standing for a moment, 
while I survey the green and spreading fields 
of my farm, it seems to me trul}^ as if all nature 
were making a bow to me. It seems to me 
that there never was a better cow than mine, 
never a more really perfect horse, and as for 
pigs, could any in. this world herald my ap- 
proach with more cheerful gruntings and 
squealings 1 



CONTENTMENT 247 

But there are other requisites for a farm. 
It must not be too large, else it will keep you 
away from your friends. Provide a town 
not too far off (and yet not too near) where 
you can buy your flour and sell your grain. 
If there is a railroad convenient (though not 
so near that the whistling of the engines 
reaches you), that is an added advantage. 
Demand a few good old oak trees, or walnuts, 
or even elms will do. No well-regulated farm 
should be without trees; and having secured 
the oaks — buy your fuel of your neighbours. 
Thus you will be blessed with beauty both 
summer and winter. 

As for neighbours, accept those nearest at 
hand ; you will find them surprisingly human, 
like yourself. If you like them you will be 
surprised to find how much they all like you 
(and will upon occasion lend you a spring- 
tooth harrow or a butter tub, or help you 
with your plowing) ; but if you hate them 
they will return your hatred with interest. I 
have discovered that those who travel in pur- 
suit of better neighbours never find them. 

Somewhere on every farm, along with the 
other implements, there should be a row of 
good books, which should not be allowed to 



248 ADVENTURES IN 

rust with disuse: a book, like a hoe, grows 
brighter with employment. And no farm, 
even in this country where we enjoy the even 
balance of the seasons, rain and shine, shine 
and rain, should be devoid of that irrigation 
from the currents of the world's thought which 
is so essential to the complete life. From the 
papers which the postman puts in the box 
flow the true waters of civilisation. You will 
find within their columns how to be good or 
how to make pies: you will get out of them 
what you look for! And finally, dow^n the 
road from your farm, so that you can hear the 
bell on Sunday mornings, there should be a 
little church. It will do you good even 
though, like me, you do not often attend. It 's 
a sort of Ark of the Covenant ; and when you 
get to it, you will find therein the True Spirit — 
if you take it with you when you leave home. 
Of course you will look for good land and 
comfortable buildings when you buy your 
farm: they are, indeed, prime requisites. I 
have put them last for the reason that they 
are so often first. I have observed, however, 
that the joy of the farmer is by no means in 
proportion to the area of his arable land. It 
is often a nice matter to decide between acres 



CONTENTMENT 249 

and contentment: men perish from too much 
as well as from too little. And if it be pos- 
sible there should be a long table in the dining- 
room and little chairs around it, and small beds 
upstairs, and young voices calling at their 
play in the fields — if it be possible. 

Sometimes I say to myself: I have grasped 
happiness! Here it is; I have it. And yet, 
it always seems at that moment of complete 
fulfillment as though my hand trembled, that 
I might not take it ! 

I wonder if you recall the story of Chris- 
tian and Hopeful, how, standing on the hill 
Clear (as we do sometimes — at our best) 
they looked for the gates of the Celestial City 
(as we look — how fondly !) : 

" Then they essayed to look, but the remembrance 
of that last thing that the shepherds had showed 
them made their hands shake, by means of which 
impediment they could not look steadily through the 
glass: yet they thought they saw something like the 
gate, and also some of the glory of the place." 

How often I have thought that I saw some 
of the glory of the place (looking from the hill 
Clear) and how often, lifting the glass, my 
hand has trembled! 



